scholarly journals Hygiene, Sociality, and Culture in Contemporary Rural China. The Uncanny New Village

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lili Lai
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Production ◽  
Rural China ◽  
The Political ◽  
Rural Welfare ◽  
The Mean ◽  
China Today ◽  
Village Life ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
Contemporary Chinese ◽  
Mean Time

By taking the lived body as local, unstable, diverse, and open to urban and global incorporations, this book highlights contemporary Chinese and global reductions of diverse conditions into generalized objects, especially in the Chinese state's well-intended social welfare effort of "building socialist new villages" which in the mean time shows clearly how judgments come to be disguised as facts (Cf. Pigg 1992). The political economic roots and social determinants of "dirty villages," the strategies of inhabiting "villages with empty centers," and the local and national projects of cultural production all reveal much about class and power in China today. Unlike other close ethnographies of small places in China, this reading of local culture is considered in the context of the national and global practices that maintain a deeply divisive rural-urban divide in everyday hygienic practices. This book argues that substantive ethnographic attention to the specificities of village life in the contemporary Henan context can destabilize China's chronic rural-urban divide and contribute to an effective rural welfare intervention to improve the hygienic conditions of village life at present.

scholarly journals Hygiene, Sociality, and Culture in Contemporary Rural China. The Uncanny New Village

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lili Lai
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Production ◽  
Rural China ◽  
The Political ◽  
Rural Welfare ◽  
The Mean ◽  
China Today ◽  
Village Life ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
Contemporary Chinese ◽  
Mean Time

By taking the lived body as local, unstable, diverse, and open to urban and global incorporations, this book highlights contemporary Chinese and global reductions of diverse conditions into generalized objects, especially in the Chinese state's well-intended social welfare effort of "building socialist new villages" which in the mean time shows clearly how judgments come to be disguised as facts (Cf. Pigg 1992). The political economic roots and social determinants of "dirty villages," the strategies of inhabiting "villages with empty centers," and the local and national projects of cultural production all reveal much about class and power in China today. Unlike other close ethnographies of small places in China, this reading of local culture is considered in the context of the national and global practices that maintain a deeply divisive rural-urban divide in everyday hygienic practices. This book argues that substantive ethnographic attention to the specificities of village life in the contemporary Henan context can destabilize China's chronic rural-urban divide and contribute to an effective rural welfare intervention to improve the hygienic conditions of village life at present.

scholarly journals Metamorphosis of a butterfly: Neo-liberal subjectivation and queer autonomy in Xiyadie's papercutting art

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 243-263
Author(s):  
Hongwei Bao
Keyword(s):  
Identity Politics ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Rural China ◽  
Social Identities ◽  
Chinese Art ◽  
Class Politics ◽  
Biographical Approach ◽  
China Today ◽  
Contemporary Chinese

Abstract Celebrated as 'China's Tom of Finland', Xiyadie is probably one of the best-known queer artists living in China today. His identity as a gay man from rural China and his method of using the Chinese folk art of papercutting for queer artistic expression make him a unique figure in contemporary Chinese art. As the first academic article on the artist and his works, this article examines Xiyadie's transformation of identity in life and his representation of queer experiences through the art of papercutting. Using a critical biographical approach, in tandem with an analysis of his representative artworks, I examine the transformation of Xiyadie's identity from a folk artist to a queer artist. In doing so, I delineate the transformation and reification of human subjectivity and creativity under transnational capitalism. Meanwhile, I also seek possible means of desubjectivation and human agency under neo-liberal capitalism by considering the role of art in this picture. This article situates Xiyadie's life and artworks in a postsocialist context where class politics gave way to identity politics in cultural production. It calls for a reinvigoration of Marxist and socialist perspectives for a nuanced critical understanding of contemporary art production and social identities.

Hygiene, Sociality, and Culture in Contemporary Rural China

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lili Lai
Keyword(s):  
Social Welfare ◽  
Rural China ◽  
Chinese Government ◽  
Social Welfare Program ◽  
Rural Villages ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
Village Life ◽  
Contemporary Chinese ◽  
Hygienic Conditions ◽  
Improve Health

This book presents a new perspective on attempts by the contemporary Chinese government to transform the diverse conditions found in countless rural villages into what the state's social welfare program deems 'socialist new villages'. Lili Lai argues that an ethnographic focus on the specifics of village life can help destabilize China's persistent rural-urban divide and help contribute to more effective welfare intervention to improve health and hygienic conditions of village life.

Breaking with the Family Form: Historical Categories, Social Reproduction, and Everyday Life in Late 1950s Rural China

2021 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 869-894
Author(s):  
Alexander F. Day
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Social Reproduction ◽  
Rural China ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Real ◽  
Social Forms ◽  
Real Material ◽  
Material Conditions ◽  
Political Economic

Abstract This article explores the way PRC historians use analytical categories by looking at the emergence of a divide between production and the social reproduction of labor (all the work that goes into producing and raising laborers) that transformed and structured rural everyday life during the Mao period. Everyday life is historical, produced in different ways under different material conditions, structured and shaped by social forms in motion. Thus, it is not an analytical frame through which historians can view the real content of the Mao period underneath the thin veneer of Maoist high politics and its categories. This article therefore argues that everyday life, far from a sphere resisting the impositions and dictates of the state, is fully implicated in the political-economic structuring of society. This is a call to not simply replace an earlier social science focus on the political economy of the PRC with a bottom-up or empirical view of everyday life, recognizing that everyday life is already a structured terrain. Rather than bringing in social science analytical categories from the outside or searching for an empirical real view from below, we need to investigate the emergence of categories and social forms from the real material limits and tendencies of a rapidly changing PRC society.

The Value of Food in Rural China

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ellen Oxfeld
Keyword(s):  
Rural China ◽  
Guangdong Province ◽  
Historical Background ◽  
The Political ◽  
Dietary Regime ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
Anthropology Of Food ◽  
Changing Role ◽  
Organizing Principles

This chapter introduces the setting of the study and the major themes of the study. The setting of the book is a Hakka village, pseudonymously named Moonshadow Pond in northeast Guangdong Province. The chapter provides relevant historical background to the changing role of food in rural China over the last one hundred years, explaining briefly the political economic upheavals which have ultimately lead to a transformed dietary regime. The chapter also introduces the specific context of Moonshadow Pond, and describes its food universe. It surveys the main currents in the anthropology of food that have helped frame this study, and introduces the key organizing principles through which this study investigates the role of food in the community: labor, memory, exchange, morality, and sociality.

The Sinosphere left looks at rising China: Missed dialogues and the search for an ‘Asian perspective’

2018 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 336-357 ◽  
Author(s):  
Li Zhiyu ◽  
Morgan Rocks
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
Cold War ◽  
The Political ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
The Past ◽  
Echo Chamber ◽  
Rising China ◽  
China Today ◽  
Political Economic

Contemporary left-wing debate in the Sinosphere, here limited to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Hong Kong, and Taiwan, is often fuelled by the political, economic, and social implications of the PRC’s rise as a world power. While agreeing upon basic premises of anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism, left-wing intellectuals in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan come to loggerheads over critiquing how China’s rise influences its leftist identity. In the past few years we have witnessed a series of fractured and one-sided arguments among Sinosphere left-wing intellectuals. As part of the research dialogues on mapping the intellectual public sphere in China today, this article examines the cacophony of the Sinosphere leftist echo chamber, starting from contentious debates over the leftist nature of Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement and Taiwan’s Sunflower Movement, and then focusing on voices that are attempting to bring together left-wing traditions from the PRC, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Scholars such as He Zhaotian, Chen Kuan-Hsing, and Sun Ge are exploring possibilities of de-imperialization, decolonization, and de-Cold War-ization, in the hopes of creating a shared, emancipatory ‘Asian perspective’. Though few in number, these voices demonstrate a growing utopian urge within the Sinosphere left to participate in mutual dialogues on possible futures.

scholarly journals The Beguiling: Glamour in/as Platformed Cultural Production

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 205630511989877 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison Hearn ◽  
Sarah Banet-Weiser
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Production ◽  
Digital Culture ◽  
Digital Content ◽  
The Political ◽  
Social Connection ◽  
Aesthetic Form ◽  
Information Awareness ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
Popular Feminism

Arguing that questions of power expressed through aesthetic form are too often left out of current approaches to digital culture, this article revives the modernist aesthetic category of glamour in order to analyze contemporary forms of platformed cultural production. Through a case study of popular feminism, the article traces the ways in which glamour, defined as a beguiling affective force linked to promotional capitalist logics, suffuses digital content, metrics, and platforms. From the formal aesthetic codes of the ubiquitous beauty and lifestyle Instagram feeds that perpetuate the beguiling promise of popular feminism, to the enticing simplicity of online metrics and scores that promise transformative social connection and approbation, to the political economic drive for total information awareness and concomitant disciplining, predicting and optimizing of consumer-citizens, the article argues that the ambivalent aesthetic of glamour provides an apt descriptor and compelling heuristic for digital cultural production today.

scholarly journals La leyenda negra” in contemporary Spanish authors´ articles

2019 ◽  
pp. 102-116
Author(s):  
L. V. Artemova
Keyword(s):  
Spanish Language ◽  
The Political ◽  
Spanish History ◽  
Spanish Society ◽  
The Mean ◽  
Black Legend ◽  
Written Word ◽  
High Level ◽  
Political Economic

This article is dedicated to the expression of the main concepts of the historic issue “The Black Legend” in the modern public Spanish language on the material of the publications of two authors, J. Marias and J. Cercas, in the Sunday supplement to the newspaper “El País”. It deals the historically marked notion artificially introduced into the circulation during the next two centuries by the countries-enemies of Spain on the political stage and it influenced the attitude of the other countries and even the population of Spain itself to their Motherland and to themselves. Being the historical issue it was spread by the mean of written word o by published pamphlets and its influence can still be noticed even in the modern qualified press.“The resonances” of those remote ideas impregnate the opinion-based journalism of the famous Spanish writers, persons with the high level of education and culture, with great number of literary awards and dozens of novels, whose thoughts are respected by the great number of readers.Among the main columns of “The Black Legend”there are four key positions: anti-propaganda of political, economic and religious spheres of Spanish society’s life; attributing to the main figures of Spanish history only negative features like imperfections, failures which turned to refer to the whole Spanish society; discreditation of the intellectual part of the country and, themost painful, its support and approval by other European intellectuals of that time like Voltaire or Montesquieu. Even nowadays there are numerous investigations and publications by foreign authors that echo the old “The Black Legend” trying to depreciate or minimize the role of Spanish power in the world history.

Introduction

Hydropolitics ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Christine Folch
Keyword(s):  
Political Ecology ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Fossil Fuels ◽  
Social Structures ◽  
The Political ◽  
Electrical Machine ◽  
Human Interventions ◽  
Itaipu Dam ◽  
Cascade Effects ◽  
Political Economic

This chapter gives a background on politics via water. It talks about Hydropolitics, the political economy that comes from an industrialization and electrification powered by water. It uncovers how it comes to matter to politics within Paraguay that the electricity that powers homes and factories comes from hydro, not fossil fuels. To untangle how energy can be simultaneously technological and sociopolitical, this chapter explains that people's relationship to the environment is a form of cultural production, which, in turn, inflects political, economic, and social structures. Understanding the dam requires the dual intervention of political ecology, which analyzes both how human interventions shape environment and how the shaping of nature in turn affects human communities. Itaipú has presented the Brazilian and Paraguayan governments the ability to achieve multiple political goals and has had far-reaching cascade effects. What Itaipú Dam has done is to turn the Paraná River under its influence into a political-electrical machine, an engineered complex of geological objects, atmospheric cycles, and cement intrusions.

Revisiting Collectivism and Rural Governance in China

2020 ◽  
pp. 35-49
Author(s):  
Lau Kin Chi
Keyword(s):  
Social Structure ◽  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
The Political ◽  
Organizational Unit ◽  
Rural Governance ◽  
Almost All ◽  
China Today ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
The Cultural Revolution

Zhoujiazhuang is singular, being the only de facto people's commune in China today. At present, Zhoujiazhuang still maintains the political, economic, and social structure that has been essentially in place since 1956. For over sixty years—since ten years before the Cultural Revolution and thirty-eight years after the dismantling of almost all people's communes in 1982—Zhoujiazhuang has survived as an organizational unit over the same territory comprising the same six natural villages.

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