The Anthropology of China

The following sections are included:

• About the Authors
• Contents

“The Anthropology of China” that we offer here works in two complementary directions. It offers students, teachers, and other readers a number of anthropological topics that we introduce in each chapter. In each case, we show many ways that the anthropology of China finds its inclusion in these mainstream topics and at the same time challenges the ways they have been construed. In the other direction, it offers students, teachers, and other readers primarily interested in China, the insights that anthropological studies gives to aspects of the social, economic and political history, and contemporary life of China…

Anthropology, as the study of humankind, traces both the commonalities and specificities of humanity across time and space. In order to accomplish this, anthropological projects often focus their attention on particular people and represent their lives through a type of writing called ethnography. In doing so, anthropologists usually engage in more or less explicit forms of comparison, often within the constructed boundaries of a group of people at various spatial scales (e.g. local, national, regional) or across different periods of time (e.g. lifetimes, decades, epochs). Making comparisons necessitates a level of abstraction that simplifies, even distorts, the complexity of a particular situation. There is a long-standing and unresolved debate about how far anthropological comparisons should reach across particular ethnographic specificities. In addition, any form of textual representation involves the author making a selection process from the vast complexity of everyday life as experienced in order to create an account of events that persuades the reader of its validity. These issues of comparability and representation have been linked to a ‘crisis in anthropology’ in the wake of the crumbling of anthropology's scientific paradigm…

In anthropology, the study of kinship has a long held pride of place in the disciplinary showcase, not least as the discipline could offer unique insights. The anthropological study of kinship found footing somewhere between the individual focus of psychology and the institutional dynamics traced by sociologists. In many ways, anthropologists of kinship stood on middle ground between the two, while simultaneously offering perspectives well beyond the remit of the Western academy and normative nuclear families associated with modernity…

The last chapter engaged with kinship, particularly in its ritual, legal, and political dimensions. Taking a long historical view on the institution of the Chinese patrilineage allowed us to abstract and compare models over time and space. We not only traced changes and continuities to the institution with its characteristic attributes of patriliny, virilocality, and ancestral worship historically, but also considered its geographic variation across China's vast territory. In this chapter, we build on this classic perspective to kinship by examining more recent theoretical approaches to relatedness, which is the study of how people relate to one another…

This chapter analyzes changes and continuities in romantic love and intergenerational love in China to address the recent anthropological issue of the formation and performance of emotion. Anthropologists have examined where to draw the line between cultural particularities and human universals in the creation and expression of emotions. This is particularly important in tracing how emotions are related to notions of self and the shifting attachments people make to each other and wider society through the intimate field of emotion. This chapter examines the changes and continuities to love, both as a romantic and an intergenerational phenomenon in China, and addresses these issues through three interconnected areas: first, whether changing expressions of emotion in China are the result of increasing autonomy and privacy, second, whether there has been a shift in expressions of emotions from actions to words, and third, whether love affirms or transcends dependence…

This chapter examines the exchange of gifts and money in China, and how they are not just a product of, but simultaneously produce, social relationships. The chapter begins with a classic assumption in social theory contrasting impersonal transactions of money and commodities through the market, on the one hand, and interpersonal exchanges of gifts that hold emotional and personal values, on the other. The chapter asks: How appropriate is this contrast in the Chinese case…

Everybody eats. Despite the universal necessity for food, food does not just bring people together, but can also divide and separate humans from each other. Food's status as a universal part of human experience and as vital to biological processes makes it such a powerful substance for communication between people as they eat and act. What, how, and when to consume particular foods varies radically across the world, bringing together issues of economics and religion, politics and intimacy, livelihood and taste, nationality and family. A diversity of ingredients, agricultural practices, processing techniques, distribution channels, cooking methods, food taboos, eating etiquette, and consumption habits differ radically between and across populations, although this diversity also forges global networks of food production, preparation, and consumption. Therefore, food not only eats away at bounded concepts of place and identity, but highlights questions of universalism and particularity within and between different regions, locales, and contexts…

Comparing the diversity of engagement between humans and their environments around the world challenges assumptions about a universal dualism between nature and culture. This echoes some of the anthropological debates we encountered in previous chapters, including critiques of classical anthropological assumptions of a universal biology and a stabilizing nature underlying a diversity of socially differentiated kinship systems. It similarly mirrors theoretical debates in the anthropology of food that polarized materialist approaches and structuralist or symbolic analyses of how particular culinary practices emerged that cannot readily be reduced to strategies of survival, on the one hand, nor abstract systems of cognition or meaning, on the other. In this chapter, we will examine related discussions emerging within the terrain of anthropology of the environment, analyzing a foundational text in this debate, as well as how Chinese conceptions of the environment have become intertwined with notions of social justice and political activism in recent years…

One of the oldest and most central topics of anthropology, ritual is still a subject of definitional and theoretical disputation. Ritual is always a sequence of actions whose order must be obeyed, including much attention to detail and frequent repetition, so that every performance, even when variations can be observed over time, is reckoned to be a repetition of the last time it was performed. Further, rituals are performed for a purpose, whether that be in the course of a liturgy in a sacred place sacralising the performers and their audience, an offering to deities or ancestors or propitiations against maleficent forces to secure health or safety or human and agrarian fertility or success in examinations or in business, or to give thanks for any of these, or else to perform a rite of passage, for instance into marriage…

‘Hospitality’ suggests that every human culture includes reaching out to fellow humans, according to its own conception of humanity. But as we shall see, the main features of hospitality are that it entails profoundly unequal relationships and is full of ambivalences, not a simple recognition of common humanity. Hospitality is a relation between a “sovereign”, who is master of a space, moving up in scale from a home to a polity, and a visitor. In other words, it is a relationship of the generosity of an insider to an outsider, however defined…

Hospitality, as we have seen, is always about the opening up of the host's sovereignty to the visitors. In discussing hospitality, the term ‘stranger’ includes not just the lone wanderer who may be dangerous or someone infinitely more powerful, who appears in a disguise of lowliness. We have added to this the representative of sovereignty on a higher scale, which includes a lower sovereignty, one example of which is the noble or the king and his entourage visiting and becoming a burden of hospitality on his host-subjects. Now we propose to expand this idea using the suggestion that sovereigns on this large scale are by nature strangers…

Until the 19th century, the most prosperous and productive regions of China, measured in terms of Gross domestic Product (GDP) per person and average income, matched the most prosperous areas of Europe (Goldstone, 2002). Despite exports being a small part of the Chinese market economy, China was the center of its own world system with exchange relations of hospitality (tribute, treaty, marriage) and trade that reached Europe and Africa as well as the Pacific and Indian Ocean shores, directly or indirectly. China had remarkably large-scale industrial regions, in iron smelting, in ceramics, in silk-weaving and others. Nevertheless, steam-powered industrial production was first developed not in China, but in northern Europe as a way of producing commodities for profitable sale including export and they were commodities of everyday use, not just luxury items…

We hope that we have achieved two things in writing this book. One is a new way of studying the anthropology of China, namely one based on anthropology as much as on China. The other is to bring anthropological studies of China into the field of general anthropology. Each chapter has shown ways that anthropological studies of China contribute to, challenge, and entail modifications of the way each of the classical and more recent themes in mainstream anthropology that we have introduced are treated and understood. Anthropologists cannot afford to ignore the anthropology of China…

The following sections is included:

• Index