Culture and Society of China - READING LIST

Department of Anthropology & Sociology
COURSE INFORMATION
Academic Year: 2018/2019
Department Anthropology and Sociology

Course Title Culture and Society of China
Course Code 15PANH062
Term Spring
Unit Value 0.5 (15 credits)
Contact Hours Per Week - Lecture 1.0
Contact Hours Per Week – Tutorial 1.0
Course Convenor Jakob Klein
Course Teacher Jakob Klein
MA Culture and Society of China (15PANH062)

Convenor/Teacher: Dr Jakob Klein ([email protected])
Email: [email protected]
Tel.: 020 7898 4428
Office: Room 564 (Main Building)
Office Hours: Wednesdays, 11:00-13:00
China is experiencing dynamic changes, and is frequently described as a nation in

transition. Yet at the same time, China is often represented as being shackled by its
deep-rooted traditions and long history. This course critically engages with both of
these characterizations. It explores the continuities, shifts and reinventions, unities and
diversities, of Chinese culture and society, in areas ranging from family and kinship to
rural/urban relations to popular religion to food and health. In so doing, the course
introduces students to a wide range of classic and emerging themes in the anthropology
of China, providing them with a strong foundation for further study and research. The
course focuses on the People’s Republic of China, but does so in relation to global
processes and transnational connections, including to Taiwan and the Chinese diaspora.
Lecture programme
Week 1: Anthropology in/of China
Week 2: Globalizing/Localizing Chinese Foodways
Week 3: Social Stratification and Inequality: The Urban-Rural Divide
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Week 4: Social Stratification and Inequality: From Class to Strata?
Week 5: Family and Kinship
(Week 6: Reading week)
Week 7: Commensality, Hospitality and Exchange
Week 8: Popular Religion, Ritual and the State
Week 9: Nationalities, Place-based Identities and ‘Chineseness’
Week 10: Dietary Knowledge and Changing Cultures of Health
Week 11: Social Dimensions of Food Safety
Background reading
The course assumes a basic grasp of Chinese history, especially since the late-
nineteenth century. Some of the following readings will help fill in historical
knowledge (Spence 2013; Mitter 2016). Others offer overviews of contemporary
Chinese society, culture and politics (Zang 2016; Perry and Selden 2010; Pieke 2016),
and of anthropological approaches to these (Bruckermann and Feuchtwang 2016).
Spence, Jonathan (2013) The Search for Modern China (3rd revised edition). New
York: W. W. Norton & Company.
Mitter, Rana (2016) Modern China: A Very Short Introduction (2nd edition). Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Zang, Xiaowei (ed.) (2016) Understanding Chinese Society (2nd edition). Abingdon,
Oxon: Routledge.
Perry, Elizabeth and Mark Selden (eds) (2010) Chinese Society: Change, Conflict, and
Resistance (3rd edition). Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.
Pieke, Frank (2016) Knowing China: A Twenty-First Century Guide. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.
Bruckermann, Charlotte and Stephan Feuchtwang (2016) The Anthropology of China:

China as Ethnographic and Theoretical Critique. London: Imperial College Press.
Course readings
Each class consists of one fifty-minute lecture and one fifty-minute tutorial. Students are
expected to prepare for tutorials in advance. You must prepare a minimum of two
journal articles (or the equivalent) each week. Additionally, all students are expected
to give one in-class presentation during the term.
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Readings are divided into ‘essential’, ‘main’ and ‘further’.
Essential readings. Read at least one of these each week prior to the tutorial. All essential
readings are available either online via the SOAS Library (eJournal and eBook Finder)
or in multiple hard copies in the SOAS Library.
Main readings. This category comprises a large number and range of articles, book
chapters and ethnographic monographs to allow you to choose according to your own
interests. Read at least one item from this category each week in preparation for tutorials.
Further readings are provided for students who wish to explore particular topics in greater
depth, for example for a term essay.
Book Reviews
20% of your mark for the course will be based on a review of a monograph on the
anthropology of China. The book review is to be no longer than 500 words (and ideally
not shorter than 450 words) and is to be submitted electronically on the course Moodle
no later than 23:59 on 18 February 2019. Overlength reviews and reviews submitted
after the due date are penalized – see the cover sheet for details on penalties.
A good book review does more than simply summarize the content. It is a critically
engaged discussion, written for an audience that cannot be assumed to have read the
book. You may use direct quotations from the book but do so in moderation and always
reference the relevant page number(s). You are not expected to reference other works in
your review; if you do you should do so sparingly. Referencing should be done in-text,
not in footnotes, following a citation system such as that used in the Journal of the Royal
Anthropological Institute. Any text cited in your review must be included in a list of
references. Footnotes should ideally be avoided altogether, but in some cases one or two
may be justified. Footnotes are included in the word count. Reference lists are not.
Review one book from this list:
Osburg, John (2013) Anxious Wealth: Money and Morality among China’s New Rich.
Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Liu, Xin (2000) In One’s Own Shadow: An Ethnographic Account of the Condition of
Post-Reform Rural China. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Oxfeld, Ellen (2017) Bitter and Sweet: Food, Meaning, and Modernity in Rural China.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Zhang, Li (2001) Strangers in the City: Reconfigurations of Space, Power and Social
Networks within China’s Floating Population. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Zhang, Li (2010) In Search of Paradise: Middle-Class Living in a Chinese Metropolis.

Ithaca: Cornell University.
Hsu, Carolyn (2007) Creating Market Socialism: How Ordinary People are Shaping Class
and Status in China. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
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Hanser, Amy (2008) Service Encounters: Class, Gender, and the Market for Social
Distinction in Urban China. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Watson, Rubie S. (1985) Inequality among Brothers: Class and Kinship in South China.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wolf, Margery (1968) The House of Lim: A Study of a Chinese Farm Family. New York:
Appleton-Century-Crofts.
Wolf, Margery (1972) Women and the Family in Rural Taiwan. Stanford: Stanford
University Press.
Yan, Yunxiang (2003) Private Life Under Socialism: Love, Intimacy, and Family Change in
a Chinese Village, 1949-1999. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Yan, Yunxiang (1996) The Flow of Gifts: Reciprocity and Social Networks in a Chinese
Village. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Kipnis, Andrew (1997) Producing Guanxi: Sentiment, Self, and Subculture in a North
China Village. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.
Stafford, Charles (2000) Separation and Reunion in Modern China. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.
Oxfeld, Ellen (2010) Drink Water, But Remember the Source: Moral Discourse in a
Chinese Village. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Steinmüller, Hans (2013) Communities of Complicity: Everyday Ethics in Rural China.

New York: Berghahn Books.
Ahern, Emily Martin (1981) Chinese Ritual and Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Feuchtwang, Stephan (2001) Popular Religion in China: The Imperial Metaphor. Ricmond,
Surrey: Curzon Press, 2001.
Jing, Jun (1996) The Temple of Memories: History, Power, and Morality in a Chinese
Chau, Adam Yuet (2006) Miraculous Response: Doing Popular Religion in Contemporary
China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Harrell, Stevan (2001) Ways of Being Ethnic in Southwest China. Seattle: University of
Washington Press.
Chio, Jenny (2014) A Landscape of Travel: The Work of Tourism in Rural Ethnic China.
Seattle: University of Washington Press.
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Chao, Emily (2013) Lijiang Stories: Shamans, Taxi Drivers, and Runaway Brides in Reform-
Era China. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
Gladney, Dru C. (1996) [1991]. Muslim Chinese: Ethnic Nationalism in the People’s
Republic. Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Studies and Harvard University Press.
Farquhar, Judith and Qicheng Zhang (2012) Ten Thousand Things: Nurturing Life in
Contemporary Beijing. New York: Zone Books.
Lora-Wainwright, Anna (2013) Fighting for Breath: Living Morally and Dying of Cancer in a
Chinese Village. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.
Essays
An essay question is provided in the reading list for each week. Choose your essay
question from among these. Your essay should be between 2,000 and 2,500 words in
length. The maximum word limit is 2,500 words. Over-length essays are penalized (see
course cover sheet above). Please use double-spacing and reference your essays
according to the system used in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute or a
similar system. Term essays are to be submitted electronically by 23:59 on 22nd April
2019. There are penalties for late submission (see course cover sheet).
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Week 1. Anthropology in/of China
The introductory lecture provides an overview of the history of the anthropology of and in
China, raising questions about the construction of anthropological knowledge of Chinese
culture and society. Students are not expected to prepare readings for this week’s tutorials
(hence the absence of a category of ‘essential’ readings).
Essay question
‘Anthropology’s Western origins make its ill-suited to studying Chinese societies and
cultures.’ Discuss.
Main readings
Pieke, Frank (2014) ‘Anthropology, China, and the Chinese century’, Annual Review of
Anthropology, 43: 123-38
Harrell, Stevan (2001) ‘The anthropology of reform and the reform of anthropology:
anthropological narratives of recovery and progress in China’, Annual Review of
Anthropology, 30: 139-61.
Dirlik, Arif, with Gunnan Li and Hsiao-pei Yen (eds) (2012) Sociology and Anthropology in
Twentieth Century China: Between Universalism and Indigenism. Hong Kong: The Chinese
University Press.
Eades, J.S. (2012) ‘The emerging socio-cultural anthropology of emerging China’, in Richard
Fardon et al. (eds), The SAGE Handbook of Social Anthropology, Vol. 1. London: SAGE,
pp.405-421.
Bilik, Naran (2001) ‘Chinese openness and anthropology’s nativization’, Chinese Sociology
and Anthropology, 33 (4): 49-58.
Wang Jianmin and John A. Young (2006) ‘Applied anthropology in China’, National
Association for the Practice of Anthropology Bulletin, 25 (1): 70-81.
Hong, Keelung (1994) ‘Experiences of being a “native” while observing anthropology’,

Anthropology Today, 10 (3): 6-9.
Blum, Susan D. (2006) ‘In and out of the ethnographer’s shadow: “native” identity in the
anthropology of China’, Reviews in Anthropology, 35: 79-95.
Liu, Lydia (1995) Translingual Practice. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Chapter 2:
‘Translating national character: Lu Xun and Arthur Smith’
Cohen, Myron (2005) ‘Introduction to Arthur H. Smith’s Village Life in China’, in his
Kinship, Contract, Community, and State: Anthropological Perspectives on China, Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, pp.19-38.
Steinmüller, Hans (2011) ‘The reflective peephole method: ruralism and awkwardness in the
ethnography of rural China’, The Australian Journal of Anthropology, 22 (2): 220-35.
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Liu, Xin (2002) ‘Urban anthropology and the “urban question” in China’, Critique of
Anthropology, 22 (2): 109-32.
Bruckermann, Charlotte and Stephan Feuchtwang (2016) The Anthropology of China: China
as Ethnographic and Theoretical Critique. London: Imperial College Press. Chapter 2:
‘Anthropology of China: history, regionalism, and comparison’, pp. 9-38.
Wolf, Margery (1992) A Thrice-Told Tale: Feminism, Postmodernism, and Ethnographic

Responsibility. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Further readings
Fardon, Richard (1990) ‘Localizing strategies: the regionalization of ethnographic accounts’,

in Richard Fardon (ed.), Localizing Strategies: Regional Traditions of Ethnographic Writing.
Edinburgh: Scottish University Press, pp. 1-35.
Chen, Kuan-hsing (2010) Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press.
Liu, Xin (ed.) (2004) New Reflections on Anthropological Studies of (Greater) China.
Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley.
Bamo Ayi, Stevan Harrell and Ma Lunzy (2007) Fieldwork Connections: The Fabric of
Ethnographic Collaborations in China and America. Seattle: University of Washington
Press.
Heimer, Maria and Stig Thøgersen (eds) (2006) Doing Fieldwork in China. Copenhagen:
NIAS.
Turner, Sarah (ed.) (2013) Red Stamps and Gold Stars: Fieldwork Dilemmas in Upland
Southeast Asia. Vancouver: UBC Press.
Guldin, Gregory E. (1994) The Saga of Anthropology in China: From Malinowski to Moscow
to Mao. New York: M.E. Sharpe.
Morgan, W. John (2014) ‘Fei Xiaotong: a public intellectual in Communist China’,

Anthropology Today, 30 (6): 18-21.
Hamilton, Gary and Xiangqun Chang (2011) ‘China and world anthropology: a conversation
on the legacy of Fei Xiaotong (1910-2005)’, Anthropology Today, 27 (6): 20-23.
Skinner, G. William (2017) Rural China on the Eve of Revolution: Sichuan Fieldnotes, 1949-
1950, edited by Stevan Harrell and William Lavely, Seattle: University of Washington Press.
Chen, Xiaomei. (1995) Occidentalism: The Theory of Counter-Discourse in post-Mao China.

Oxford: OUP.
Vukovich, Daniel (2012) China and Orientalism: Western Knowledge Production and the
PRC. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.
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Said, Edward (1978) Orientalism. London: Penguin.
Farquhar, Judith B. and James L. Hevia (1993) ‘Culture and postwar American
historiography of China’, positions, 1 (2): 486-525.
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Week 2. Globalizing/Localizing Chinese Foodways
Chinese ‘foodways’ – a term used to denote the cultural practices and meanings surrounding
production, preparation and consumption as well as the foods and drinks themselves – have
often been described as a core, distinctive feature of Chinese culture and identity (Chang 1977).
At the same time, ‘Chinese’ foodways are historically changing and geographically diverse,
embedded in regional ecologies and local cultures and shaped by transregional and
transnational networks of trade, migration and culture, by ‘ethnic’ conflict and interaction, and
by political projects of empire-, region- and nation-building. The study of the globalization and
localization of foodways thus offers us important insights into the unities and diversities,
changes and continuities of Chinese cultures and identities.
Essay question
‘The study of foodways reveals the resilience of Chinese culture in the face of globalization
and modernization.’ Discuss.
Essential readings
Zhang, Lawrence (2016) ‘A foreign infusion: the forgotten legacy of Japanese chadō on
modern Chinese tea arts’, Gastronomica: The Journal of Critical Food Studies, 16 (1): 53-
62.
Klein, Jakob A. (2007) ‘Redefining Cantonese cuisine in post-Mao Guangzhou’, Bulletin of

the School of Oriental and African Studies, 70 (3): 511-537.
Farrer, James (2015) ‘Shanghai’s Western restaurants as culinary contact zones in a

transnational culinary field’, in James Farrer (ed.) (2015) The Globalization of Asian
Cuisines. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 103-124. (Moodle)
Main readings
Chang, K.C. (1977) ‘Introduction’, in K.C. Chang (ed.), Food in Chinese Culture:
Anthropological and Historical Perspectives. New Haven: Yale University Press, pp.1-22.
Lozada, Eriberto P., Jr. (2000) ‘Globalized childhood? Kentucky Fried Chicken in Beijing’,
in Jun Jing (ed.), Feeding China’s Little Emperors: Food, Children, and Social Change.
Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp.114-34.
Watson, James L. (ed.) (1997/2006) Golden Arches East: McDonald’s in East Asia.
Stanford: Stanford University Press. Especially: Introduction by Watson and chapters by
Yan; Watson; Wu
Gillette, Maris Boyd (2000) ‘Children’s food and Islamic dietary restrictions in Xi’an’, in Jun
Jing, ed., Feeding China’s Little Emperors: Food, Children, and Social Change. Stanford:
Stanford University Press, pp. 71-93. [Reprinted in James L. Watson and Melissa L.
Caldwell (eds) (2005), The Cultural Politics of Food and Eating: A Reader. Oxford:
Blackwell, pp.106-21.]
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Tan Chee-Beng and Ding Yulin (2010) ‘The promotion of tea in South China: re-inventing
tradition in an old industry’, Food and Foodways, 18 (3): 121-44.
Mak, Sau-Wa (2014) ‘The revival of traditional water buffalo cheese consumption: class,
heritage and modernity in contemporary China’, Food and Foodways, 22 (4): 322-347.
Goodman, David S. G. (2006) ‘Shanxi as translocal imaginary: reforming the local’, in Tim
Oakes and Louisa Schein (eds), Translocal China: Linkages, Identities, and the Reimagining
of Space. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 56-73.
Wang, Hongjie (2015) ‘Hot pepper, Sichuan cuisine and the revolutions in modern China’,
World History Connected, 12 (3): 12pp. Available online:
<http://worldhistoryconnected.press.illinois.edu/12.3/wang.html>
Yang, Fan (2015) ‘A Bite of China: food, media, and the televisual negotiation of national
difference’, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 32 (5): 409-25.
Farrer, James (2010) ‘Eating the West and beating the rest: culinary Occidentalism and urban
soft power in Asia’s global food cities’, in James Farrer (ed.), Globalization, Food and Social
Identities in the Asia Pacific Region. Tokyo: Sophia University Institute of Comparative
Culture.
(Available at: http://icc.fla.sophia.ac.jp/global%20food%20papers/html/farrer.html)
Swislocki, Mark (2009) Culinary Nostalgia: Regional Food Culture and the Urban
Experience in Shanghai. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Especially: Introduction and
Chapter 4.
Klein, Jakob A. (2006) ‘Changing tastes in Guangzhou: restaurant writings in the late 1990s’,
in Kevin Latham, Stuart Thompson and Jakob Klein (eds), Consuming China: Approaches to
Cultural Change in Contemporary China. London and New York: Routledge, pp.104-120.
Klein, Jakob A. (2009) ‘“For eating, it’s Guangzhou”: regional culinary traditions and
Chinese socialism’, in Harry G. West and Parvathi Raman (eds), Enduring Socialism:
Explorations of Revolution and Transformation, Restoration and Continuation. New York
and Oxford: Berghahn Books, pp. 44-76.
Liu, Xin (2000) In One’s Own Shadow: An Ethnographic Account of the Condition of Post-
Reform Rural China. Berkeley: University of California Press. Chapter 4: ‘Meaning and
eating’, pp.82-106.
Klein, Jakob (2018) ‘Industrialization and local foodways in the People’s Republic of China’,
Anthropology of This Century, 21 (January). Online:
http://aotcpress.com/articles/industrialization-and-local-
foodways/
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Chan, Selina C. (2010) ‘Food, memories, and identities in Hong Kong’, Identities: Global
Studies in Culture and Power, 17 (2-3): 204-227.
Cheng Sea-ling (2002) ‘Eating Hong Kong’s way out’, in Katarzyna Cwiertka and
Boudewijn Walraven (eds), Asian Food: The Global and the Local. Richmond, Surrey:
Curzon Press, pp.16-33.
Avieli, Nir (2005) ‘Roasted pigs and bao dumplings: festive food and imagined transnational
identity in Chinese-Vietnamese festivals’, Asia Pacific Viewpoint, 46 (3): 281-93.
Chan Yuk Wah (2011) ‘Bahn Cuon and Cheung Fan: searching for the identity of the
“steamed rice flour roll”’, in Tan Chee-beng (ed), Chinese Food and Foodways in Southeast
Asia and Beyond. Singapore: NUS Press, pp.156-71.
Further readings
Klein, Jakob A. (2018) ‘Heritagizing local cheese in China: opportunities, challenges, and
inequalities’, Food & Foodways 26 (1): 63-83.
Farrer, James (ed.) (2015) The Globalization of Asian Cuisines. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Wu, Xu (2011) Farming, Cooking, and Eating Practices in the Central China
Highlands. Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press.
Watson, James L. (2014) ‘Meat: a cultural biography in (South) China’, in Jakob A. Klein
and Anne Murcott (eds), Food Consumption in Global Perspective: Essays in the
Anthropology of Food in Hon our of Jack Goody. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp.25-44.
Su Jianling (2001) ‘The changing foodways of a village in the Pearl River Delta area’, in
David Y.H. Wu and Tan Chee-beng (eds), Changing Chinese Foodways in Asia, Hong Kong:
The Chinese University Press, pp. 35-55.
Tan Chee-beng (2003) ‘Family meals in rural Fujian: aspects of Yongchun village life’,
Taiwan Journal of Anthropology, 1 (1): 179-195. [Available from SOAS Library in hard
copy only]
Hanson, Martha (1998) ‘Robust Northerners and delicate Southerners: the nineteenth century
invention of a southern medical tradition’, positions: East Asia Cultures Critique, 6 (3): 515-
550.
Anderson, E.N (1988) The Food of China. New Haven: Yale University Press. Chapter 12:
‘Regions and locales’, pp.194-228.
Anderson, E.N. (1994) ‘Food’, in Dingbo Wu and Patrick D. Murphy (eds), Handbook of
Chinese Popular Culture. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
Anderson E.N. (2007) ‘Malaysian foodways: confluence and separation’, Ecology of Food
and Nutrition, 46, 205-219.
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Klein, Jakob A. (2013) “There is no such thing as Dian cuisine!” Food and local identity in
urban Southwest China’, Food and History, 11 (1): 203-25.
DeBernardi, Jean (2015) ‘Wudang Daoist tea culture’, in Kwang Ok Kim (ed.) Re-Orienting
Cuisine: East Asian Foodways in the Twenty-First Century. Oxford: Berghahn, pp. 56-70.
Lu, Shun and Gary Alan Fine (1995) ‘The presentation of ethnic authenticity: Chinese food
as a social accomplishment’, The Sociological Quarterly, 36 (3): 535-53.
Wu, David Y.H. and Sidney C.H. Cheung (eds) (2002) The Globalization of Chinese Food.
Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press. Especially: Wu, ‘Improvising Chinese cuisine overseas’.
Wu, David Y.H. and Tan Chee-beng (eds) (2001), Changing Chinese Foodways in Asia.
Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press. Especially: Chapters by Kim; Chua and Rajah;
Tan; Tam
Liu, Haiming and Lianlian Lin (2009) ‘Food, culinary identity, and transnational culture:
Chinese restaurant business in southern California’, Journal of Asian American Studies, 12
(2): 135-62.
Jung, Yuson (2012) ‘Experiencing the “West” through the “East” in the margins of Europe’,
Food, Culture & Society, 15 (4): 579-598.
Miller, Hanna (2006) ‘Identity takeout: how American Jews made Chinese food their ethnic
cuisine’, Journal of Popular Culture, 39 (3): 430-465.
Tan Chee-beng (ed.) (2011) Chinese Food and Foodways in Southeast Asia and Beyond.
Singapore: NUS Press.
Mintz, Sidney W. (2007) ‘Asia’s contributions to world cuisine: a beginning enquiry’, in

Sidney C.H. Cheung and Tan Chee-Beng (eds), Food and Foodways in Asia: Resource,
Tradition and Cooking. London and New York, Routledge, 201-210.
Mintz, Sidney W. and Chee Beng Tan (2001) ‘Bean-curd consumption in Hong Kong’,
Ethnology, 40 (2): 113-28.
Chen, Yu-Jen (2011) ‘Ethnic politics in the framing of national cuisine: state banquets and
the proliferation of ethnic cuisine in Taiwan’, Food, Culture & Society, 14 (3): 315-33.
Goody, Jack (1998) ‘The globalisation of Chinese food’, in his Food and Love: A Cultural
History of East and West. London: Verso, pp.161-71.
Roberts, J.A.G. (2002) China to Chinatown: Chinese Food in the West. London: Reaktion
Books.
Tagliocozzo, Eric and Wen-Chin Chang (eds) (2011) Chinese Circulations: Capital,
Commodities and Networks in Southeast Asia. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Chang, K.C. (ed.) (1977) Food in Chinese Culture: Anthropological and Historical
Perspectives. New Haven: Yale University Press.
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Sabban, Françoise (2000) ‘China’, trans. Elborg Foster, in Kenneth F. Kiple and Kriemhild
Coneè Ornelas (eds), The Cambridge World History of Food (Volume Two). Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, pp. 1165-1175.
Mazumdar, Sucheta (1999) ‘The impact of new world food crops on the diet and economy of
China and India, 1600-1900’, in Raymond Grew (ed.), Food in Global History. Boulder:
Westview Press, pp. 58-78.
Du Bois, Christine, Tan Chee-beng and Sidney W. Mintz (eds) (2008) The World of Soy.
Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Wank, David L. (2010) ‘Culinary nostalgia and Chinese neo-liberalism: local dish restaurants
in Shanxi province’, in James Farrer (ed.), Globalization, Food and Social Identities in the
Asia Pacific Region. Tokyo: Sophia University Institute of Comparative Culture.
URL: http://icc.fla.sophia.ac.jp/global%20food%20papers/html/farrer.html
Mazumdar, Sucheta (2008) ‘China and the Global Atlantic: Sugar from the age of Columbus
to Pepsi-Coke and ethanol’, Food and Foodways, 16 (2): 135-47.
Chan, Selina Ching (2012) ‘Terroir and green tea in China: the case of Meijiawu Dragon
Well (Longjing) tea’, in L. Augustin-Jean, H. Ilbert and N. Saavedra-Rivano (eds)
Geographical Indications and International Agricultural Trade: The Challenge for Asia.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Zhao, Xing, Donald Finlay and Moya Kneafsy (2014) ‘The effectiveness of contemporary
Geographical Indications (GIs) schemes in enhancing the quality of Chinese agrifoods’,
Journal of Rural Studies, 36: 77-86.
Zhang, Jinghong (2013) Puer Tea: Ancient Caravans and Urban Chic. Seattle: University of
Washington Press.
Zhang, Yang and Pang Ching Lin (2012) ‘From home food to Macanese cuisine? Historical
development, tourist branding and cultural identity’, Sociology Study, 2 (12): 934-40.
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Week 3. Social Stratification and Inequality: The Urban-Rural Divide
The rural-urban relationship in China has often been characterized as a ‘gap’ or ‘divide’.
Indeed, the perceived economic and cultural gap between country and city was described
by Mao Zedong as one of China’s ‘three disparities’ (the others being between agriculture
and industry and between mental and manual labour). The divide should not be thought
of as some timeless feature of Chinese ‘tradition’, however, but needs to be historicized.
Arguably, it was in many respects a twentieth-century development, closely connected
to emerging discourses that equated cities and urbanites with ‘modernity’ and the
countryside and ‘the peasant’ with ‘tradition’ and ‘backwardness’ (Cohen 1993; Faure
and Liu 2002). Moreover, far from narrowing the gap, Chinese Communist Party policies
of the Mao years (1950s-1970s) if anything exacerbated it, creating what has been
described as a ‘caste-like’ system of stratification between, on the one hand, privileged
urban residents who enjoyed an ‘iron rice bowl’ and, on the other, rural residents who
were tied to the land (Potter and Potter 1990). In the reform era, the relationship between
city and country, urbanite and peasant, continues to be profoundly shaped by older
structures and discourses, while also taking on new forms and meanings.
Essay question:
‘The greater social and geographical mobility of the reform era profoundly challenges
the social divide between city and country entrenched during the Mao era.’ Discuss.
Essential readings
Yan, Hairong (2003) ‘Spectralization of the rural: reinterpreting the labor mobility of rural
young women in post-Mao China’, American Ethnologist, 30 (4): 578-596.
Park, Choon-Hwan (2014) ‘Nongjiale tourism and contested space in rural China’, Modern
China, 40 (5): 519-48.
Lai, Lili (2014) ‘Everyday hygiene in rural Henan’, positions: East Asia Cultures Critique,
22 (3): 635-659.
Main readings
Guang, Lei (2003) ‘Rural taste, urban fashion: the cultural politics of urban/rural
difference in contemporary China’, positions: East Asia Cultures Critique, 11 (3): 613-
46.
Sun Wanning (2009) ‘Suzhi on the move: body, place, and power’, positions: East Asia
Cultures Critique, 17 (3): 617-642.
Schneider, Mindi (2015) ‘What, then, is a Chinese peasant? Nongmin discourses and
agroindustrialization in contemporary China’ Agriculture and Human Values, 32 (2): 331-46.
Cohen, Myron L. (1993) ‘Cultural and political inventions in modern China: the case of
the Chinese peasant’, in Tu Weiming (ed.) China in Transformation, Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press. [Reprinted in Myron L. Cohen, 2005. Kinship, Contract,
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Community and State: Anthropological Perspectives on China. Stanford: Stanford
University Press, pp. 60-74.]
Kipnis, Andrew B. (2013) ‘Urbanisation in between: rural traces in a rapidly growing and
industrialising county city’, China Perpsectives, 3: 5-12.
Ma, Laurence J.C. and Biao Xiang (1998) ‘Native place migration and the emergence of
peasant enclaves in Beijing’, The China Quarterly, 155: 546-81.
Chuang, Julia (2015) ‘Urbanization through dispossession: survival and stratification in

China’s new townships’, Journal of Peasant Studies, 42 (2): 275-294.
Anagnost, Ann (2006) ‘Strange circulations: the blood economy in rural China’,
Economy and Society 35 (4): 509-529.
Potter, Sulamith Heins and Jack M. Potter (1990) China’s Peasants: The Anthropology
of a Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chapter 15: ‘A caste-like
system of social stratification: the position of peasants in modern China’s social order’,
pp. 296-312.
Bray, David (2005) Social Space and Governance in Urban China: The Danwei System
from Origins to Reform. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Especially Chapter 7:
Reforming the Danwei, pp. 157-93.
Lü, Xiaobo and Elizabeth J. Perry (1997) (eds) Danwei: The Changing Chinese
Workplace in Historical and Comparative Perspective. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe.
Unger, Jonathan (1989) ‘Review article: State and peasant in post-revolution China’, Journal
of Peasant Studies, 17 (1): 114-36.
Further reading
Whyte, Martin King (ed.) (2010) One Country, Two Societies: Rural-Urban Inequality
in Contemporary China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Williams, Raymond (1973) The Country and the City. Chatto & Windus Ltd.
Pong, Myra (2014) Educating the Children of Migrant Workers in Beijing. London:
Routledge.
Faure, David and Tao Tao Liu (eds) (2002) Town and Country in China: Identity and
Perception. Houndmills: Palgrave. Introduction and chapters to interest.
Honig, Emily (1992) Creating Chinese Ethnicity: Subei People in Shanghai, 1850-1980.
New Haven: Yale University Press.
Esherick, Joseph W. (ed.) (2000) Remaking the Chinese City: Modernity and National
Identity, 1900-1950. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. See, e.g. Michael Tsin,
‘Canton Remapped’.
15
Cheng, Tiejun and Mark Selden (1994) ‘The origins and consequences of China’s hukou
system’, The China Quarterly, 139: 644-688.
Watson, James L. (2011) ‘Feeding the revolution: public mess halls and coercive
commensality in Maoist China’, in Everett Zhang, Arthur Kleinman and Tu Weiming (eds),
Governance of Life in Chinese Moral Experience: The Quest for an Adequate Life. London
and New York: Routledge, pp.33-46.
Thaxton, Ralph A., Jr. (2008) Catastrophe and Contention in Rural China: Mao’s Great
Leap Forward Famine and the Origins of Righteous Resistance in Da Fo Village.
Yan, Hairong (2009) New Masters, New Servants: Development, Migration, and Women
Workers in China. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Yan, Hairong (2006) Rurality and Labor Process Autonomy: The Question of
Subsumption in the Waged Labor of Domestic Service. Cultural Dynamics, 18 (1): 5-31.
Yang, Mingchuan (1994) ‘Reshaping peasant culture and community: rural

industrialization in a Chinese village’, Modern China, 20 (2): 157-179.
Pun Ngai (1999) ‘Becoming dagongmei (working girls): the politics of identity and
difference in reform China’, The China Journal, 42: 1-20.
Murphy, Rachel (ed.) (2009) Labour Migration and Social Development in

Contemporary China. London: Routledge.
Attané, Isabelle (2002) ‘A half century of Chinese socialism: the changing fortunes of
peasant families’, Journal of Family History, 27 (2): 150-71.
Solinger, Dorothy J. (1999) Contesting Citizenship in Urban China. Berkeley: University

of California Press.
Zhang, Li and Ong, Aihwa (eds.) 2008. Privatizing China: Socialism from Afar. Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press.
Jacka, Tamara (2005) Rural Women in Urban China: Gender, Migration and Social
Change. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe.
Pun, Ngai (2005) Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace.
Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press.
Gaetano, Arianne M. and Tamara Jacka (eds) (2004) On the Move: Women in Rural-to-
Urban Migration in Contemporary China. New York: Columbia University Press.
Guldin, Gregory Eliyu (2001) What’s a Peasant to Do? Village Becoming Town in
Southern China. Boulder: Westview Press.
Kirkby, Richard et al. (2000) Small Town China: Governance, Economy, Environment
and Lifestyle in Three Zhen. Aldershot: Dartmouth.
16
17
Week 4. Social Stratification and Inequality: From Class to Strata?
Building on last week’s investigation of the urban-rural divide, we trace the changing
contours and logics of social stratification and inequality in reform-era China,
considering breaks and continuities with the Maoist and pre-socialist pasts. We explore
the relationship between ‘class’ and gender distinctions, the cultural and political
significance of the ‘middle class’, consumption, discourses of ‘human quality’ (suzhi),
and the role of the socialist state in shaping social differentiation.
Essay question
‘Social stratification in the reform era represents a fundamental break with the Maoist past.’
Discuss.
Essential readings
Anagnost, Ann (2008) ‘From “class” to “social strata”: grasping the social totality in reform
era China’, Third World Quarterly, 29 (3): 497-519.
Hanser, Amy (2005) ‘The gendered rice bowl: the sexual politics of service work in urban
China’, Gender and Society, 19 (5): 581-600.
Hsu, Carolyn L. (2005) ‘A taste of “modernity”: working in a western restaurant in market

socialist China’, Ethnography, 6 (4): 543-565.
Stanford: Stanford University Press. Chapter 4: ‘From fruit plates to license plates:
consumption, status, and recognition among Chengdu’s elite’, pp. 113-142. (Moodle)
Main readings
Zhang, Li (2008) ‘Private homes, distinct lifestyles: performing a new middle class’, in Li
Zhang and Aihwa Ong (eds), Privatizing China: Socialism from Afar. Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, pp. 23-40.
Breitung, Werner (2012) ‘Enclave urbanism in China: attitudes toward gated communities in
Guangzhou’, Urban Geography, 33 (2): 278-294.
Tomba, Luigi (2009) ‘Of quality, harmony, and community: civilization and the middle class
in urban China’, positions: East Asia Cultures Critique, 17 (3): 591-616.
Pun, Ngai (2003) ‘Subsumption or consumption? The phantom of consumer revolution in

“globalizing” China.’ Cultural Anthropology, 18(4): 469-492.
Zhan, Mei (2008) ‘Wild consumption: relocating responsibilities in the time of SARS’, in Li
Zhang and Aihwa Ong (eds), Privatizing China: Socialism from Afar. Ithaca, NY: Cornell
Pan Tianshu (2011) ‘Place attachment, communal memory, and the moral underpinnings of
gentrification in postreform Shanghai’, in Arthur Kleinman, Yunxiang Yan, Jing Jun, Sing Lee,
18
Everett Zhang, Pan Tianshu, Wu Fei and Guo Jinhua, Deep China: The Moral Life of the
Person. What Anthropology and Psychiatry Tell Us About China Today, Berkeley: University
of California Press, pp. 152-176. (Available as an e-book via SOAS Library)
Zhang, Li (2001) Strangers in the City: Reconfigurations of Space, Power and Social Networks
within China’s Floating Population. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Especially Chapter
1: ‘The floating population as subjects’, pp. 23-46.
Yang, Jie (2010) ‘The crisis of masculinity: class, gender, and kindly power in post-Mao
China’, American Ethnologist, 37 (3): 550-562.
Watson, James L. (ed.) (1984) Class and Social Stratification in Post-Revolutionary China.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Especially chapters by Watson, Kuhn and Unger.
Jacka, Tamara (2009) ‘Cultivating citizens: suzhi (quality) discourse in the PRC’, positions:
East Asia Cultures Critique, 17 (3): 523-35.
Kipnis, Andrew (2006) ‘Suzhi: a keyword approach’, The China Quarterly, 186: 295-313.
Griffiths, Michael B. and Jesper W. Zeuthen (2014) ‘Bittersweet China: new discourses
of hardship and social organization’, Journal of Current Chinese Affairs 43 (4): 143-174.
Tomba L. (2014). The Government Next Door: Neighborhood Politics in Urban China.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Further readings
Zhang, Li (2010) In Search of Paradise: Middle-Class Living in a Chinese Metropolis.

Ithaca: Cornell University.
Hsu, Carolyn (2007) Creating Market Socialism: How Ordinary People are Shaping Class
and Status in China. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Hanser, Amy (2008) Service Encounters: Class, Gender, and the Market for Social
Distinction in Urban China. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Goodman, David, S.G. (ed.) (2008) The New Rich in China: Future Rulers, Present Lives.
Abingdon: Routledge.
Whyte, Martin King (2010) The Myth of The Social Volcano: Perceptions of Inequality and
Distributive Injustice in Contemporary China. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Hsing, You-tien (2010) The Great Urban Transformation: Politics of Land and Property in
China. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Davis, Deborah and Feng Wang (eds) (2009) Creating Wealth and Poverty in Postsocialist
China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Guo, Yingjie (ed.) (2016) Handbook on Class and Social Stratification in China.
Northampton, MA: EE Elgar.
19
Rofel, Lisa (1999) Other Modernities: Gendered Yearnings in China after Socialism.
Bakken, Børge 2000. The Exemplary Society: Human improvement, Social Control and the
Dangers of Modernity in China. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Esherick, Joseph W. and Mary B. Rankin (eds) (1990) Chinese Local Elites and Patterns of
Dominance. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Johnson, David (1985) ‘Communication, Class and Consciousness’, in D. Johnson, A.J.

Nathan & E.S. Rawski (eds), Popular Culture in Late Imperial China. Berkeley: University
20
Week 5. Family and Kinship
Anthropologists have long taken family and kinship to be central to the study of Chinese
culture, but understandings of the practices and institutions of kinship have changed over time
and have been subject to debate. This week we explore different approaches to the study of
Chinese family and kinship. We consider the relationship between genders and generations
within the family and ask in what ways these may have changed in recent decades.
Essay question
How have inter-generational and gender relations in the family changed in recent
decades?
Essential readings
Yan, Yunxiang (1997) ‘The triumph of conjugality: structural transformation of family

relations in a Chinese village’, Ethnology, 36 (3): 191-212.
Stafford, Charles (2000) ‘Chinese patriliny and the cycles of yang and laiwang’, in
Janet Carsten (ed.), Cultures of Relatedness: New Approaches to the Study of Kinship.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 37-54. (Moodle)
Fong, Vanessa L. (2002) ‘China’s one-child policy and the empowerment of urban
daughters’, American Anthropologist, 104 (4): 1098-1109.
Main readings
Wang, Danning (2010) ‘Intergenerational transmission of family property and family

management in urban China’, The China Quarterly, 204: 966-79.
Yan, Yunxiang (2003) Private Life Under Socialism: Love, Intimacy, and Family Change
in a Chinese Village, 1949-1999. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Chapter 7: ‘Elderly
support and the crisis of filial piety’, pp. 162-89. Other chapters according to interest.
Yan, Yunxiang (2005) ‘The individual and transformation of bridewealth in rural north
China’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.), 11(4): 637-58.
Santos, Gonҫalo (2009) ‘The “stove-family” and the process of kinship in rural South China’,
in Susanne Brandtstädter and Gonҫalo Santos (eds), Chinese Kinship: Contemporary
Anthropological Perspectives. London and New York: Routledge, pp.112-36. (available as
an e-book via SOAS Library)
Bruckermann, Charlotte (2017) ‘Caring claims and the relational self across time:
grandmothers overcoming reproductive crises in rural China’, Journal of the Royal
Anthropological Institute, 23 (2): 356-375.
Watson, James L. (2000) ‘Food as lens: the past, present, and future of family life in China’
in Jun Jing (ed.) Feeding China’s Little Emperors: Food, Children, and Social Change.
21
Hershatter, Gail (2012) ‘Disquiet in the house of gender’ The Journal of Asian Studies, 71
(4): 873-94.
Judd, Ellen (1989) ‘Niangjia: Chinese women and their natal families’, The Journal of
Asian Studies, 48 (3): 525-544.
Judd, Ellen (2009) ‘“Families we create”: women’s kinship in rural China as spatialized
practice’, in Susanne Brandtstädter and Gonҫalo Santos (eds), Chinese Kinship:
Contemporary Anthropological Perspectives. London and New York: Routledge,
pp.29-47. (available as an e-book via SOAS Library)
Evans, Harriet (2010) ‘The gender of communication: changing expectations of mothers and
daughters in urban China’, The China Quarterly, 204: 980-1000.
Hansen, Mette Halskov and Cuiming Pang (2008) ‘Me and my family: perceptions of
individual and collective among young rural Chinese’, European Journal of East Asian
Studies, 7 (1): 75-99.
Thøgersen, Stig and Ni Anru (2008) ‘“He is he, and I am I”: individual and collective
among China’s rural elderly’, European Journal of East Asian Studies, 7 (1): 11-37.
Santos, Gonҫalo and Stevan Harrell (eds) (2016) Transforming Patriarchy: Chinese
Families in the Twenty-First Century. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
Further readings
Sangren, P. Steven (2013) ‘The Chinese family as instituted fantasy: or, rescuing kinship
imaginaries from the symbolic’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.), 19 (2):
279-299.
Trémon, A. C. (2016) ‘Flexible kinship: shaping transnational families among the Chinese in
Tahiti’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.), 23 (1): 42-60.
Watson, James L. (1982) ‘Chinese kinship reconsidered: anthropological perspectives on

historical research’, The China Quarterly, 92: 589-622.
Ikels, Charlotte (ed.) (2004) Filial Piety: Practice and Discourse in Contemporary East Asia.
Stanford: Stanford University Press. Especially chapters 1-6.
Baker, Hugh D. R. (1979) Chinese Family and Kinship. London: MacMillan.
Watson, Rubie S. (1985) Inequality among Brothers: Class and Kinship in South China.
Jankowiak, William R. and Robert L. Moore (eds) (2016) Family Life in China.
Cambridge: Polity Press.
Brandtstädter, Susanne and Gonҫalo Santos (eds) (2009) Chinese Kinship:

Contemporary Anthropological Perspectives. London and New York: Routledge.
(available as an e-book via SOAS Library)
22
Chan, Kwok-shing (2013) ‘Women’s property rights in a Chinese lineage village’,
Modern China, 39 (1): 101-128.
Fong, Vanessa L (2004) Only Hope: Coming of Age under China’s One-Child Policy.
Fong, Vanessa L. (2007) ‘Parent-child communication problems and the perceived

inadequacies of Chinese only children’, Ethos, 35 (1): 85-127.
Davis, Deborah and Stevan Harrell (1993) ‘Introduction: the impact of post-Mao reforms on
family life’, in Deborah Davis and Stevan Harrell (eds), Chinese Families in the Post-Mao
Era. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp.1-22.
Whyte, Martin K (1997) ‘The fate of filial obligations in urban China’, The China
Journal, 38: 1-31.
Whyte, Martin King (ed.) (2003) China’s Revolutions and Intergenerational Relations.
Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, The University of Michigan.
Gates, Hill (1996) China’s Motor: A Thousand Years of Petty Capitalism. Ithaca: Cornell
University Press. Chapter 5: ‘Patricorporations: the state and the household’, pp. 84-102;
and Chapter 6: ‘Patricorporations: the lineage’, pp. 103-121.
Wolf, Margery (1968) The House of Lim: A Study of a Chinese Farm Family. New York:
Appleton-Century-Crofts.
Wolf, Margery (1972) Women and the Family in Rural Taiwan. Stanford: Stanford
University Press.
Ahern, Emily Martin (1975) ‘The power and pollution of Chinese Women’, in M. Wolf
and R. Witke (eds) Women in Chinese Society. Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp.
193-214.
Seaman, Gary (1981) ‘The sexual politics of karmic retribution’, in E.M. Ahern and H.
Gates (eds) The Anthropology of Taiwanese Society. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Wolf, Arthur and C.S. Huang (1980) Marriage and Adoption in China, 1845-1945.
Stanford: Stanford University Press. Especially Chapter 4: ‘The family’, pp. 57-69.
Bray, Francesca (1997) Technology and Gender: Fabrics of Power in Late Imperial
China. Berkeley: University of California Press. Part 1: ‘Building a tradition: the
construction of Chinese social space’, pp. 49-172.
Liu, Xin (1998) ‘Yao: the practice of everyday space in northern rural Shaanxi’, in Wen-
hsin Yeh, ed., Landscape, Culture, and Power in Chinese Society. Berkeley: Institute of
East Asian Studies, University of California, pp.129-152.
Hsu, Francis L.K. (1948) Under the Ancestors’ Shadow: Chinese Culture and
Personality. New York: Columbia University Press. Especially chapters 1-5, pp. 3-130.
23
Cohen, Myron L. (2005) Kinship, Contract, Community and State: Anthropological
Perspectives on China. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Cohen, Myron (1970) ‘Developmental process in the Chinese domestic group’, in

Maurice Freedman (ed.), Family and Kinship in Chinese Society. Stanford: Stanford
University Press, pp.21-36.
Cohen, Myron (1976) House United, House Divided: The Chinese Family in Taiwan.
New York: Columbia University Press.
Knapp, Ronald (1999) China’s Living Houses: Folk Beliefs, Symbols, and Household
Ornamentation. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Chapter 2: ‘Dwellings as social
templates’, pp. 7-28.
Chan, Alan K.L. and Sor-hoon Tan (eds) (2004) Filial Piety in Chinese Thought and
History. London: RoutledgeCurzon.
Schneider, Helen M. (2011) Keeping the Nation’s House: Domestic Management and the
Making of Modern China. Vancouver: UBC Press.
Glosser, Susan L. (2003) Chinese Visions of Family and State, 1915-1953. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Sangren, P. Steven (1984) ‘Traditional Chinese corporations: beyond kinship’, Journal

of Asian Studies, 43(3): 391-415.
Faure, David (2007) Emperor and Ancestor: State and Lineage in South China. Stanford:
Stanford University Press.
Faure, David (1989) ‘The lineage as cultural invention: the case of the Pearl River Delta’,
Modern China 15 (1): 4-36.
Week 6. Reading Week
24
Week 7. Commensality, Hospitality and Exchange
Commensality (eating together), hospitality, exchanging gifts and notions of reciprocity play
key parts in the construction of guanxi, or social ties, and of persons. Indeed, reciprocity is
central not only construction of human social relationships and persons, but also of people’s
relations with supernatural beings. Food is a particularly important medium of exchange. It is
used to express the specific tenor of the relationship between eaters or between givers and
receivers of food, and is an important marker of power and status. Such meanings are not fixed,
however, but are often open to interpretation, negotiation and contestation. As such, studying
the changing practices and contexts surrounding food exchanges, gifts, offerings and
commensality offer a way into understanding wider social and cultural change, including
changing moralities and notions of the person.
Essay question
How are relationships and hierarchies constructed through gift exchange and commensality?
How, if at all, has this changed during the reform era?
Essential readings
Mason, Katherine A. (2013) ‘To your health! Toasting, intoxication and gendered critique
among banqueting women’, The China Journal, 69: 108-33.
Kipnis, Andrew (1997) Producing Guanxi: Sentiment, Self, and Subculture in a North China
Village. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Chapter 2: ‘Guest/host etiquette and
banquets’, pp.39-57. (Moodle)
Watson, James L (1987) ‘From the common pot: feasting with equals in Chinese society’,
Anthropos, 82: 389-401.
Oxfeld, Ellen (2014) ‘The moral significance of food in reform-era rural China’, in Yuson
Jung, Jakob A. Klein and Melissa L. Caldwell (eds), Ethical Eating in the Postsocialist and
Socialist World. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 44-68. (Moodle)
Main readings
Cooper, Eugene (1986) ‘Chinese table manners: You are how you eat’, Human Organization,
45 (2): 179-84.
Stafford, Charles (2000) Separation and Reunion in Modern China. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press. Chapter 5: ‘Commensality as reunion’, pp. 99-109 &
Chapter 3: ‘Greeting and sending off the dead’, 70-86.
Watson, James L. (2011) ‘Feeding the revolution: public mess halls and coercive
commensality in Maoist China’, in Everett Zhang, Arthur Kleinman and Tu Weiming (eds),
Governance of Life in Chinese Moral Experience: The Quest for an Adequate Life. London
and New York: Routledge, pp.33-46.
Kipnis, Andrew B. (1996) ‘The language of gifts: managing guanxi in a North China
village’, Modern China, 22 (3): 285-314.
25
Yan, Yunxiang (1996) The Flow of Gifts: Reciprocity and Social Networks in a Chinese
Village. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Especially: Chapter 5: ‘The structure of guanxi
in village society’, pp.98-121, and Chapter 6: ‘The principle of reciprocity and renqing
ethics’, pp.122-46.
Stanford: Stanford University Press. Especially Chapters 2 and 3.
Erbaugh, Mary S. (2008) ‘China expands its courtesy: saying “hello” to strangers’, The
Journal of Asian Studies, 67 (2): 621-52.
Mayfair Mei-hui (1989) ‘The gift economy and state power in China’, Comparative
Studies in Society and History, 31 (1): 25-54.
Gold, Thomas B. (1985) ‘After comradeship: personal relations in China since the Cultural
Revolution’, The China Quarterly, 104: 657-675.
Wolf, Arthur P. (1974) ‘Gods, ghosts and ancestors’, in Arthur P. Wolf (ed.), Religion and
Ritual in Chinese Society. Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp. 131-182.
Thompson, Stuart E. (1988) ‘Death, food and fertility’, in James L. Watson and Evelyn S.
Rawski (eds), Death Ritual in Late Imperial and Modern China. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 71-108.
Sangren, P. Steven (2000) ‘Dialectics of alienation: individuals and collectivities in

Chinese religion’, in his Chinese Sociologics: An Anthropological Account of the Role of
Alienation in Social Reproduction. London: Athlone, pp. 69-95.
Chau, Adam Yuet (2006) Miraculous Response: Doing Popular Religion in Contemporary
China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press: ‘Modes of social event production’ (pp.124-
46) & ‘Red-hot sociality’ (pp. 147-68)
Chau, Adam Yuet (2008) ‘The sensorial production of the social’, Ethnos, 73 (4): 485-504.
Further readings
Sterckx, Roel (ed.) (2005) Of Tripod and Palate: Food, Politics, and Religion in Traditional
China. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Stafford, Charles (ed.) (2003) Living with Separation in China: Anthropological Accounts.
London: RoutledgeCurzon.
Dorfman, Diane (1995) ‘Communication, identity and cake in rural China’, Asian Thought
and Society, 20 (58-59): 68-92.
26
Chan, Anita and Jonathan Unger (1982) ‘Grey and black: the hidden economy of rural
China’, Pacific Affairs, 55 (3): 452-71.
Bloch, Maurice (1999) ‘Commensality and poisoning’, Social Research 66 (1): 133-49.
Ahern, Emily (1973) The Cult of the Dead in a Chinese Village. Stanford: Stanford
University Press. Chapter 10: ‘Worship at the grave’, pp.163-74.
Aijmer, Göran (1984) ‘Birth and death in China: musings on a Taiwan corpus’, Ethnos,
44 (1-2): 5-42.
Gossaert, Vincent (2005) ‘The beef taboo and the sacrificial structure of late imperial
Chinese society’, in Roel Sterckx (ed.), Of Tripod and Palate: Food, Politics, and Religion in
Traditional China. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 237-48.
Sutton, Donald S. (1995) ‘Consuming counterrevolution: the ritual and culture of

cannibalism in Wuxuan, Guangxi, China, May to July 1968’, Comparative Studies in
Society and History, 37 (1): 136-72.
Stafford, Charles (ed.) (2013) Ordinary Ethics in China (London School of Economics
Monographs on Social Anthropology Volume 79). London: Bloomsbury.
Kleinman, Arthur, Yunxiang Yan, Jing Jun, Sing Lee, Everett Zhang, Pan Tianshu, Wu Fei
and Guo Jinhua (2012) Deep China: The Moral Life of the Person. What Anthropology and
Psychiatry Tell Us About China Today. Berkeley: University of California Press. Especially:
Introduction and chapters by Yan, Guo & Kleinman, and Kleinman.
Oxfeld, Ellen (2010) Drink Water, But Remember the Source: Moral Discourse in a
Chinese Village. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Steinmüller, Hans (2013) Communities of Complicity: Everyday Ethics in Rural China.

New York: Berghahn Books.
Ku Hok-bun (2003) Moral Politics in a Chinese Village: Responsibility, Reciprocity, and

Resistance. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Yang, Mayfair Mei-hui (1994) Gifts, Favors, and Banquets: The Art of Social
Relationships in China. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.
Hansen, Mette Halskov and Rune Svarverud (eds) (2010) iChina: The Rise of the Individual
in Modern Chinese Society. Copenhagen: NIAS.
Yan, Yunxiang (2009) The Individualization of Chinese Society (London School of

Economics Monographs on Social Anthropology, Volume 77). Oxford and New York: Berg.
Especially: Introduction & Conclusion.
Walder, Andrew G. (1986) Communist Neo-traditionalism: Work and Authority in Chinese

Industry. Berkeley: University of California Press.
27
Liu, Xin (2002) The Otherness of Self: A Genealogy of the Self in Contemporary China.
Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.
Fei Xiaotong (1992 [1947]) From the Soil: The Foundations of Chinese Society, trans.
Gary G. Hamilton and Wang Zheng, Berkeley: University of California Press.
King, Ambrose Yeo-chi (1994) ‘Kuan-hsi and network building: a sociological

interpretation’, in Tu Wei-ming, ed., The Living Tree: The Changing Meaning of Being
Chinese Today. Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp. 109-26.
King, Ambrose Y.C. (1985) ‘The individual and group in Confucianism: a relational
perspective’, in Donald J. Munro, ed., Individualism and Holism: Studies in Confucian
and Taoist Values. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, pp.57-70.
Hu, Hsien Chin (1944) ‘The Chinese concepts of “face”’, American Anthropologist, 46:
45-64.
Harrell, Stevan (1981) ‘Normal and deviant drinking in rural Taiwan’, in Arthur Kleinman
and Tsung-Yi Lin, eds., Normal and Abnormal Behavior in Chinese Society. Dordrecht: D.
Reidel Publishing Company, pp.49-59.
Gold, Thomas, Doug Guthrie and David Wank (eds) (2002) Social Connections in China:
Institutions, Culture, and the Changing Nature of Guanxi. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Yang, Lien-Sheng (1957) ‘The concept of pao as a basis for social relations in China’, in
John K. Fairbank, ed., Chinese Thought and Institutions. Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press.
Liu, Xin (2000) In One’s Own Shadow: An Ethnographic Account of the Condition of
Post-Reform Rural China. Berkeley: University of California Press. Chapter 7: ‘Immoral
politics’, pp. 157-179.
28
Week 8. Popular Religion, Ritual and the State
Despite predictions of its disappearance under state socialism – and numerous policies
and political campaigns aimed at hastening its demise – popular religion and ritual remain
integral to Chinese cultural life, particularly but not exclusively in the countryside. In this
unit, we explore the breaks, continuities and reinventions of Chinese popular religion,
and ask what these processes might tell us about the role of state in Chinese culture and
everyday life.
Essay question
How would you characterise the relationship between popular religion and the state?
Essential readings
Siu, Helen F. (1989) ‘Recycling rituals: politics and popular culture in contemporary
rural China’, in Perry Link et al. (eds), Unofficial China: Popular Culture and Thought
in the People’s Republic. Boulder: Westview Press. (Moodle)
Chau, Adam Yuet (2009) ‘Expanding the space of popular religion: local temple activism and
the politics of legitimation in contemporary China’, in Yoshiko Ashiwa and David L. Wank
(eds), Making Religion, Making the State: The Politics of Religion in Modern China,
Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp. 211-240. (Available as an e-book via SOAS Library)
Gao Bingzhong (2014) ‘How does superstition become intangible cultural heritage in
postsocialist China?’, positions, 22 (3): 551-572.
Main readings
Bunkenborg, Mikkel (2014) ‘From metaphors of empire to enchantments of state:

popular religious movements and health in rural north China’, positions, 22 (3): 573-602.
Watson, James L. and Evelyn S. Rawski (eds) (1988) Death Ritual in Late Imperial and
Modern China. Berkeley: University of California Press:
Watson, James L. ‘The structure of Chinese funerary rites’, pp. 3-19.
Rawski, Evelyn S. ‘A historian’s approach to Chinese death ritual’, 20-36.
Watson, James L. (1985) ‘Standardizing the gods: the promotion of T’ien Hou (“Empress
of Heaven”) along the South China coast’, in David Johnson et al., eds., Popular Culture
in Late Imperial and Modern China. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 292-
324.
Special Issue: Ritual, Cultural Standardization, and Orthopraxy in China: Reconsidering

James L. Watson’s Ideas. Modern China 33 (1) (2007)
Duara, Prasenjit (1988) ‘Superscribing symbols: the myth of Guandi, Chinese god of
war’, The Journal of Asian Studies, 47 (4): 778-95.
29
Shahar, Meir and Robert P. Weller (1996) ‘Introduction: gods and society in China’, in
Meir Shahar and Robert P. Weller (eds), Unruly Gods: Divinity and Society in China.
Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, pp. 1-36.
Feuchtwang, Stephan (1993) ‘Historical metaphor: a study of religious representation and the
recognition of authority’, Man (N.S.), 28 (March): 35-49.
Ahern, Emily Martin (1981) Chinese Ritual and Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press. See especially Chapter 7: ‘Ritual as a learning game’, pp. 92-108.
(available as an e-book via SOAS Library)
Sangren, P. Steven (1987) ‘Orthodoxy, heterodoxy, and the structure of value in Chinese
rituals.’ Modern China, 13 (1): 63-89.
Duara, Prasenjit (1991) ‘Knowledge and power in the discourse of modernity: the
campaigns against popular religion in early twentieth-century China’, The Journal of
Asian Studies, 50 (1): 67-83.
Feuchtwang, Stephan (2001) Popular Religion in China: The Imperial Metaphor.

Ricmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 2001. Chapter 8, ‘The politics of religion and political
ritual,’ pp. 214-50. (And other chapters according to interest)
Bruun, Ole (1996) ‘The fengshui resurgence in China: conflicting cosmologies between
state and peasantry’, The China Journal, 36: 47-65.
Oxfeld, Ellen (2004) ‘“When you drink water, think of its source”: morality, status, and
reinvention in Chinese funerals’, The Journal of Asian Studies, 63 (4): 961-90.
Flower, John M. (2004) ‘A road is made: roads, temples, and historical memory in Ya’an
County, Sichuan’, The Journal of Asian Studies, 63 (3): 649-86.
Special issue: Religion in China Today. The China Quarterly, 174 (2003). Especially
articles by Fan, Chen, Dean, and Potter.
Ashiwa, Yoshiko and David L. Wank (eds) (2009), Making Religion, Making the State: The
Politics of Religion in Modern China, Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Further readings
Goosaert, Vincent and David A. Palmer (2011) The Religious Question in Modern China.
Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Duara, Prasenjit (1987) Culture, Power, and the State: Rural North China, 1900-1942.
Wang, Mingming (2009) Empire and Local Worlds: A Chinese Model for Long-Term
Historical Anthropology. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.
30
Dean, Kenneth (2012) ‘The Daoist difference: alternatives to imperial power and visions
of a unified civilization’, Asia-Pacific Journal of Anthropology 13: 128-41.
Chau, Adam Yuet (2005) ‘The politics of legitimation and the revival of popular religion
in Shaanbei, North-Central China’, Modern China 31 (2): 236-78.
Overmyer, Daniel L. (2009) Local Religion in North China in the Twentieth Century: The
Structure and Organization of Community Rituals and Beliefs. Leiden: Brill.
Feuchtwang, Stephan (2010) The Anthropology of Religion, Charisma and Ghosts:

Chinese Lessons for Adequate Theory. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter.
Watson, James L. (1991) ‘Waking the dragon: visions of the Chinese imperial state in
local myth’, in H. Baker and S. Feuchtwang (eds), An Old State in New Settings: Studies
in the Social Anthropology of China in Memory of Maurice Freedman. Oxford: JASO,
pp.162-77.
Ward, Barbara (1979) ‘Not merely players: drama, art and ritual in traditional China’
Man, (N.S.), 14: 18-39.
Weller, Robert P. (1987) ‘The politics of ritual disguise’, Modern China, 13 (1): 17-39.
Gates, Hill (1987) ‘Money for the gods’, Modern China, 13 (3): 259-277.
Shahar, Meir (1998) Crazy Ji: Chinese Religion and Popular Literature. Cambridge,
Mass.: HarvaP. rd University Asia Center.
Blake, C. Fred (2011) Burning Money: The Material Spirit of the Chinese Lifeworld.
Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.
Dean, Kenneth (1993) Taoist Ritual and Popular Cults of Southeast China. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.
Hatfield, D.J.W. (2010) Taiwanese Pilgrimage to China: Ritual, Complicity, Community.

New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Johnson, David (2009) Spectacle and Sacrifice: The Ritual Foundations of Village Life
in North China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Jones, Stephen (2004) Plucking the Winds: Lives of Village Musicians in Old and New
China. Leiden: CHIME Foundation.
Jing, Jun (1996) The Temple of Memories: History, Power, and Morality in a Chinese
Chau, Adam Yuet (2005) Miraculous Response: Doing Popular Religion in

Contemporary China. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
31
Yang, Mayfair (1996) ‘Tradition, travelling anthropology and the discourse of modernity
in China’, in Henrietta L. Moore (ed.), The Future of Anthropological Knowledge,
London: Routledge, pp. 93-114.
Poon Shuk Wah (2004) ‘Refashioning rituals in Republican Guangzhou’, Modern China, 30
(2): 199-227.
Anagnost, Ann S. (1987) ‘Politics and magic in contemporary China’, Modern China, 13
(1): 40-61.
Freedman, Maurice (1974) ‘On the sociological study of Chinese religion’, in Arthur P.
Wolf, ed., Religion and ritual in Chinese society. Stanford: Stanford University Press,
pp. 19-41.
Yang, Ching K’un (1961) Religion in Chinese Society. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.
Bell, Catherine (1989) ‘Religion and Chinese culture: toward an assessment of “popular
religion”’, History of Religions, 29: 35-57.
Weller, Robert P. (1987) Unities and Diversities in Chinese Religion. Seattle: University
of Washington Press.
Zito, Angela (1993) ‘Ritualizing li: implications for studying power and gender’,
positions, 1 (2): 321-348.
Zito, Angela (1997) Of Body and Brush: Grand Sacrifice as Text/Performance in

Eighteenth-Century China. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
32
Week 9. Nationalities, place-based identities and ‘Chineseness’
This week we examine the significance of ‘ethnic’ identities and their relationship to place-
based and national identities and notions of ‘Chineseness’. In China, it is difficult to
understand ‘ethnicity’ without reference to the complexities of Han majority - minority
nationality relations in the shifting contexts of empire-building and nation-building and,
increasingly, tourism and other forms of (globalized) cultural consumption.
Essay question
What role does ‘nationality’ play in the construction of cultural identities in the PRC?
Essential readings
Vasantkumar, Chris (2012) ‘What is this “Chinese” in Overseas Chinese? Sojourn work
and the place of China’s minority nationalities in extra-territorial Chineseness’, The
Journal of Asian Studies, 71 (2): 423-46.
Oakes, Tim (2000) ‘China’s provincial identities: reviving regionalism and reinventing
“Chineseness”’, The Journal of Asian Studies, 59 (3): 667-692.
Schein, Louisa (1997) ‘Gender and internal orientalism in China’, Modern China, 23 (1): 69-
78.
Main readings
Joniak-Lüthi, Agniezka (2013) ‘The Han minzu, fragmented identities, and ethnicity’,
The Journal of Asian Studies, 72 (4): 849-71.
Fiskesjö, Magnus (2015) ‘Wa grotesque: headhunting theme parks and the Chinese nostalgia
for primitive contemporaries’, Ethnos, 80 (4): 497-523.
Gladney, Dru C. (1994) ‘Representing nationality in China: refiguring majority/minority

identities.’ The Journal of Asian Studies, 53 (1): 92-123.
Hillman, Ben (2003) ‘Paradise under construction: minorities, myths and modernity in
northwest Yunnan’, Asian Ethnicity 4 (2): 175-88.
Harrell, Stevan (1995) ‘Introduction: civilizing projects and the reaction to them’, in Stevan
Harrell (ed.), Cultural Encounters on China’s Ethnic Frontiers. Seattle: University of
Washington Press, pp. 3-36.
Harrell, Stevan (1990) ‘Ethnicity, local interests, and the state: Yi communities in Southwest
China’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 32 (3): 515-48.
Litzinger, Ralph A. (1998) ‘Memory work: reconstituting the ethnic in post-Mao China’,
Cultural Anthropology, 13 (2): 224-55.
33
Lipman, Jonathan (1996) ‘Hyphenated Chinese: Sino-Muslim identity in modern China’
in Gail Hershatter et al. (eds) Remapping China. Stanford: Stanford University Press,
pp.97-112.
Billé, Franck (2009) ‘Cooking the Mongols/feeding the Han: dietary and ethnic intersections
in Inner Mongolia’, Inner Asia, 11 (2): 205-30.
Hansen, Mette Halskov (2005) Frontier People: Han Settlers in Minority Areas of China.
London: C. Hurst & Co.
Cesaro, M. Cristina (2000) ‘Consuming identities: food and resistance among the Uyghur in
contemporary Xinjiang’, Inner Asia, 2 (2): 225-38.
Wu, Xu (2005) ‘The New Year’s Eve dinner and wormwood meal: festival foodways as
ethnic markers in Enshi Prefecture’, Modern China, 31 (3): 353-80.
Yeh, Emily T. and Chris Coggins (eds) (2014) Mapping Shangrila: Contested
Landscapes in the Sino-Tibetan Borderlands. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
Peng, Wenbin (2011) ‘Ethnic memory and space: legends of Zhuge Liang in Southwest
China’, Inner Asia, 13: 141-59.
Further readings
Scott, James C. (2009) The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland
Southeast Asia. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Harrell, Stevan (2001) Ways of Being Ethnic in Southwest China. Seattle: University of
Washington Press.
Kipnis, Andrew B. (2012) ‘Constructing commonality: standardization and

modernization in Chinese nation-building’, The Journal of Asian Studies, 71 (3): 731-55.
Tapp, Nicolas (1996) ‘The kings who could fly without their heads: “local” culture in
China and the case of the Hmong’, In Tao Tao Liu and David Faure (eds), Unity and
Diversity: Local Cultures and Identities in China. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University
Press, pp. 83-98.
Fiskesjö, Magnus (2010) ‘Participant intoxication and self-other dynamics in the Wa

context’, The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, 11 (2): 111-27.
Honig, Emily (1992) Creating Chinese Ethnicity: Subei People in Shanghai, 1850-1980.
New Haven: Yale University Press.
Mullaney, Thomas S. (2011) Coming to Terms with the Nation: Ethnic Classification in
Modern China. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Ebrey, Patricia (1996) ‘Surnames and Han Chinese identity’, in Melissa J. Brown (ed.),
Negotiating Ethnicities in China and Taiwan. Berkeley: University of California Press,
pp. 19-36.
34
Fiskesjö, Magnus (1999) ‘On the “raw” and the “cooked” barbarians of Imperial China’,
Inner Asia, 1 (2): 139-68.
Chao, Emily (2013) Lijiang Stories: Shamans, Taxi Drivers, and Runaway Brides in Reform-
Era China. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
Notar, Beth E. (2006) Displacing Desire: Travel and Popular Culture in China.
Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.
Chio, Jenny (2014) A Landscape of Travel: The Work of Tourism in Rural Ethnic China.
Seattle: University of Washington Press.
Blum, Susan D. (2001) Portraits of ‘Primitives’: Ordering Human Kinds in the Chinese
Nation. Lanham, MD: Roman & Littlefield.
McCarthy, Susan K. (2009) Communist Multiculturalism: Ethnic Revival in Southwest

China. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
Rawski, Evelyn S. (1996) ‘Presidential address: Reenvisioning the Qing: the significance of
the Qing period in Chinese history’, The Journal of Asian Studies, 55 (4): 829-50.
Ho, Ping-ti (1998) ‘In defense of sincization: a rebuttal of Evelyn Rawski’s “Re-envisioning
the Qing”’, The Journal of Asian Studies, 57 (1): 123-55.
Crossley, Pamela Kyle, Helen Siu and Donald F. Sutton (eds) (2006) Empire at the
Margins: Culture, Ethnicity, and Frontier in Early Modern China. Berkeley: University
Gladney, Dru C. (1996) [1991]. Muslim Chinese: Ethnic Nationalism in the People’s
Republic. Cambridge, Mass.: Council on East Asian Studies and Harvard University
Press.
Smith, Joanne N. (2002) ‘Making culture matter: symbolic, spatial and social boundaries
between Uyghurs and Han Chinese’, Asian Ethnicity, 3 (2): 153-74.
Hillman, Ben (2004) ‘The rise of the community in rural China: village politics, cultural
identity and religious revival in a Hui hamlet’, The China Journal 51: 53-73.
Atwill, David G. (2003) ‘Blinkered visions: Islamic identity, Hui ethnicity, and the Panthay
Rebellion in Southwest China, 1856-1873’, The Journal of Asian Studies, 62 (4): 1079-1108.
Giersch, C. Patterson (2001) ‘“A motley throng”: social change on Southwest China’s early
modern frontier’, The Journal of Asian Studies, 60 (1): 67-94.
Hu, Xiaojiang and Miguel A. Salazar (2010) ‘Ethnicity, rurality, and status: hukou and the
institutional and cultural determinants of social status in Tibet’, in Martin King Whyte (ed.),
One Country, Two Societies: Rural-Urban Inequality in Contemporary China. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 287-310.
35
Rack, Mary (2005) Ethnic Distinctions, Local Meanings: Negotiating Cultural Identities
in China. London: Pluto Press.
Feuchtwang, Stephan (ed.) (2004) Making Place: State Projects, Globalisation and Local
Responses in China. London: UCL Press. Chapters by Rack, Tapp, Zhao, and Feuchtwang.
Schein, Louisa (2000) Minority Rules: The Miao and the Feminine in China’s Cultural
Policies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Wu, David Y.H. (1990) ‘Minority or Chinese? Ethnicity and cultural change among the
Bai of Yunnan, China’, Human Organization, 49 (1): 1-13.
Jenner, W.J.F. (2001) ‘Race and history in China’, New Left Review, 11 (Sept-Oct): 55-77.
Faure, David and Helen F. Siu (eds) (1995) Down to Earth: The Territorial Bond in South
China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Chapters according to interest.
36
Week 10. Dietary Knowledge and Changing Cultures of Health
This week we reflect on cultural understandings and practices of eating, health and the body,
including the close relationship between food and medicine in traditional Chinese medicine
and ‘folk dietetics’. We focus on the contemporary PRC, and consider how the medicinal uses
of food and popular health practices such as ‘nurturing life’ (yangsheng) are being shaped by
factors including food globalization, dietary change and the spread of biomedical nutrition,
state power, discourses of modernity, neoliberal reforms, social stratification, and family
planning policies.
Essay question
‘Traditional approaches to food and health have become increasingly irrelevant.’ Discuss.
Essential readings
Farquhar, Judith (2002) Appetites: Food and Sex in Postsocialist China. Durham and
London: Duke University Press. Chapter 1: ‘Medicinal meals’, pp.47-77. (Available as an e-
book via SOAS Library)
Jing, Jun (2000) ‘Food, nutrition, and cultural authority in a Gansu village’, in Jun Jing (ed.),
Feeding China’s Little Emperors: Food, Children, and Social Change. Stanford: Stanford
Farquhar, Judith and Qicheng Zhang (2012) Ten Thousand Things: Nurturing Life in
Contemporary Beijing. New York: Zone Books. Especially: Chapter 2: ‘How to live’,
pp.125-67. (Moodle)
Main readings
Wiley, Andrea S. (2011) ‘Milk for “growth”: global and local meanings of milk consumption
in China, India, and the United States’, Food and Foodways, 19 (1-2): 11-33.
Lora-Wainwright, Anna (2009) ‘Fatness and well-being: bodies and the generation gap in
contemporary China’, in Byan S. Turner and Zheng Yangwen (eds), The Body in Asia. New
York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, pp.113-26.
Guo, Yuhua (2000) ‘Food and family relations: the generation gap at the table’, in Jun Jing
(ed.), Feeding China’s Little Emperors: Food, Children, and Social Change. Stanford:
Stanford University Press, pp.94-113.
Zhang, Xiaoyong et al. (2008) ‘Consumption and corpulence in China: a consumer

segmentation study based on the food perspective’, Food Policy 33 (1): 37-47.
Swislocki, Mark (2011) ‘Nutritional governmentality: food and the politics of health in Late
Imperial and Republican China’, Radical History Review, 110: 9-35.
Gottschang, Suzanne (2000) ‘A baby-friendly hospital and the science of infant feeding’, in
Jun Jing (ed.), Feeding China’s Little Emperors: Food, Children, and Social Change.
37
Farquhar, Judith (2002) Appetites: Food and Sex in Postsocialist China. Durham and
London: Duke University Press. Chapter 3: ‘Excess and Deficiency’, pp.121-63. (Available
as an e-book via SOAS Library)
Farquhar, Judith (1994) ‘Eating Chinese medicine’, Cultural Anthropology, 9 (4): 471-97.
Farquhar, Judith and Qicheng Zhang (2005) ‘Biopolitical Beijing: pleasure, sovereignty, and
self-cultivation in China’s capital’, Cultural Anthropology, 20 (3): 303-27.
Anderson, E.N. (1988) The Food of China. New Haven: Yale University Press. Chapter 11:
‘Traditional medical values of food’, pp.229-43.
Lo, Vivienne (2005) ‘Pleasure, prohibition, and pain: food and medicine in traditional
China’, in Roel Sterckx (ed.), Of Tripod and Palate: Food, Politics, and Religion in
Traditional China. New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp.163-85.
Scheid, Volker (2006) ‘Chinese medicine and the problem of tradition’, Asian Medicine,
2(1): 59-71.
Further readings
Hanson, Martha (1998) ‘Robust Northerners and delicate Southerners: the nineteenth century
invention of a southern medical tradition’, positions: East Asia Cultures Critique, 6 (3): 515-
550.
Waley-Cohen, Joanna (2007) ‘The quest for perfect balance: taste and gastronomy in
imperial China’, in Paul H. Freedman (ed.), Food: The History of Taste. Berkeley: University
of California Press, pp.99-134.
Lo, Vivienne and Penelope Barrett (2005) ‘Cooking up fine remedies: on the culinary
aesthetic in sixteenth-century materia medica’, Medical History, 49: 395-422.
Li, Shang-jen (2010) ‘Eating well in China: diet and hygiene in nineteenth-century treaty
ports’, in Angela Ki Che Leung and Charlotte Furth (eds), Health and Hygiene in Chinese
East Asia. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 109-31.
Zader, Amy (2011) ‘Technologies of quality: the role of the Chinese state in guiding the
market for rice’, East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal, 5
(4): 461-477.
French, Paul and Mattew Crabbe (2010) Fat China: How Expanding Waistlines are
Changing a Nation. London: Anthem Press.
Guldan, Georgia S. (2000) ‘Paradoxes of plenty: China’s infant- and child-feeding

transition’, in Jun Jing (ed.), Feeding China’s Little Emperors: Food, Children, and Social
Change. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 27-47.
Veeck, Ann and Gregory Veeck (2000) ‘Consumer segmentation and changing food
purchase patterns in Nanjing, PRC’, World Development, 28 (3): 457-71.
38
Gale, Fred, and Kuo Huang (2007) ‘Demand for food quantity and quality in China.’
Economic Research Service, United States Department of Agriculture, Economic Research
Report 32. Available at:
http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/err-economic-research-report/err32.aspx.
Anderson, E.N. and Marja L. Anderson (1975) ‘Folk dietetics in two Chinese communities,
and its implications for the study of Chinese medicine’, in A. Kleinman et al. (eds), Medicine
in Chinese Cultures. Washington, D.C.: US Government Printing Office, pp.143-175. See
also chapters by Topley and Ahern.
Anderson, Eugene N. (1980) ‘“Heating” and “cooling” foods in Hong Kong and Taiwan’,
Social Science Information, 19 (2): 237-68.
Chen, Nancy N. (2009) Food, Medicine, and the Quest for Good Health. New York:
Columbia University Press.
Chen, Nancy N. (2001) ‘Health, wealth, and the good life’, in Nancy N. Chen, Constance D.
Clark, Suzanne Z. Gottschang and Lyn Jeffrey (eds), China Urban: Ethnographies of
Contemporary Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 165-82.
Martin, Diana (2001) ‘Food restrictions in pregnancy among Hong Kong mothers’, in David
Y.H. Wu and Tan Chee-beng (eds), Changing Chinese Foodways in Asia. Hong Kong: The
Chinese University Press, pp.97-122.
Topley, Marjorie (1970) ‘Chinese traditional ideas and the treatment of disease: two
examples from Hong Kong’, Man (N.S.), 5: 421-37.
Seaman, Gary (1992) ‘Winds, waters, seeds, and souls: folk concepts of physiology and
etiology in Chinese geomancy’, in Charles Leslie and Allan Young (eds), Paths to Asian
Medical Knowledge. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp.74-97.
Unschuld, Paul (1986) Medicine in China: A History of Pharmaceutics. Berkeley: University

Farquhar, Judith (1994) Knowing Practice: The Clinical Encounter of Chinese Medicine.
Boulder: Westview Press.
Lee, Seung-Joon (2010) ‘Taste in Numbers: Science and the Food Problem in Republican
Guangzhou, 1927-1937’ in Twentieth-Century China, 35 (2): 81-103.
Lee, Seung-Joon (2011) Gourmets in the Land of Famine: The Culture and Politics of Rice in
Modern Canton. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
39
Week 11. Social Dimensions of Food Safety
In recent years, China’s food safety problems have received growing attention in Chinese and
international media. Indeed, food safety is frequently cited among the top concerns of
citizens in the PRC. In this unit, we consider some of the causes and consequences of China’s
food safety ‘crisis’, with a focus on its social dimensions. What can food safety challenges
and people’s responses to them tell us about social relations and the ‘moral landscape’ in
contemporary China?
Essay question
‘China’s food safety problems are shaped by and exacerbate the growing divisions in society.’
Discuss.
Essential readings
Yan, Yunxiang (2012) ‘Food safety and social risk in contemporary China’, The Journal of
Asian Studies, 71 (3): 705-729.
Hanser, Amy and Jialin Camille Li (2015) ‘Opting Out? Gated consumption, infant formula
and China’s affluent urban consumers’, The China Journal, 74: 110-128.
Lora-Wainwright, Anna (2009) ‘Of farming chemicals and cancer deaths: the politics of
health in contemporary rural China’, Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale, 17 (1): 56-
73.
Main readings
Santos, Gonçalo (2011) ‘Rethinking the Green Revolution in South China: technological
materialities and human-environment relations’, East Asian Science, Technology and
Society: An International Journal, 5: 479-504.
Veeck, Ann, Hongyan Yu and Alvin C. Burns (2010) ‘Consumer risks and new food systems
in urban China’, Journal of Macromarketing, 30 (3): 222-237.
Klein, Jakob A. (2013) ‘Everyday approaches to food safety in Kunming’, The China
Quarterly, 214: 376-393.
Gong, Qian and Peter Jackson (2012) ‘Consuming anxiety? Parenting practices in China after
the infant formula scandal’, Food, Culture and Society, 15 (4): 557-78.
Klein, Jakob A. (2017) ‘Buddhist vegetarian restaurants and the changing meanings of meat
in urban China’, Ethnos, 82 (2): 252-276.
Si, Zhenzhong, Theresa Schumilas, and Steffanie Scott (2015) ‘Characterizing alternative food
networks in China’, Agriculture and Human Values, 32: 299-313.
40
Wang, Raymond Yu, Zhenzhong Si, Cho Nam Ng and Steffanie Scott (2015) ‘The
transformation of trust in China’s alternative food networks’, Ecology and Society, 20 (2):
article 19.
Klein, Jakob A. (2014) ‘Connecting with the countryside? “Alternative” food movements with
Chinese characteristics’, in Yuson Jung, Jakob A. Klein and Melissa L. Caldwell (eds), Ethical
Eating in the Postsocialist and Socialist World. Berkeley: University of California Press,
pp.116-43.
Yang, Guobin (2013) ‘Contesting food safety in the Chinese media: between hegemony and
counter-hegemony’, The China Quarterly, 214: 337-55.
Yan, Yunxiang (2012) ‘The changing moral landscape’, in Arthur Kleinman, Yunxiang Yan,
Jing Jun, Sing Lee, Everett Zhang, Pan Tianshu, Wu Fei and Guo Jinhua, Deep China: The
Moral Life of the Person. What Anthropology and Psychiatry Tell Us About China Today,
Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 36-77. (Available as an e-book via SOAS
Library)
Further readings
Klein, Jakob A. (2009) ‘Creating ethical food consumers? Promoting organic foods in urban
Southwest China’, Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale, 17 (1): 74-89.
Klein, Jakob A. (2015) ‘Eating Green: Ecological Food Consumption in Urban China’, in
Kwang Ok Kim (ed.), Re-Orienting Cuisine: East Asian Foodways in the Twenty-First
Century. Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books, pp. 238-262.
Yan, Yunxiang (2015) ‘From food poisoning to poisonous food: the spectrum of food-safety
problems in contemporary China’, in Kwang Ok Kim (ed.), Re-Orienting Cuisine: East
Asian Foodways in the Twenty-First Century. Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books, pp.
263-286.
Thiers, Paul (2003) ‘Risk society comes to China: SARS, transparency and public
accountability’, Asian Perspective, 27 (2): 241-51.
Assmann, Stephanie (2013) ‘Reassessing food safety, risk and globalization in China and
Japan’, Food, Culture & Society, 16 (1): 6-19.
Jankowiak, William (2004) ‘Market reforms, nationalism, and the expansion of urban
China’s moral horizon’, Urban Anthropology and Studies of Cultural Systems and World
Economic Development, 33 (2/4): 167-210.
Fong, Vanessa L. (2004) ‘Filial nationalism among Chinese teenagers with global identities’,
American Ethnologist, 31 (4): 631-648.
Yan, Yunxiang (2009) ‘The Good Samaritan’s new trouble: a study of the changing moral
landscape in contemporary China’, Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale, 17 (1): 9-24.
Chen, Nancy (2010), ‘Feeding the Nation: Chinese Biotechnology and Genetically Modified
41
Foods’, in Aihwa Ong and Nancy Chen (eds) Asian Biotech: Ethics and Communities of
Fate. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Ho, Peter, Eduard B. Vermeer and Jennifer H. Zhao (2006) ‘Biotechnology and food safety
in China: consumers’ acceptance or resistance?’ Development and Change, 37 (1): 227-53.
Wang, Zhigang, Yanna Mao and Fred Gale (2008) ‘Chinese consumer demand for food
safety attributes in milk products’, Food Policy, 33: 27-36.
Sirieix, Lucie, Paul R. Kledal and Tursinbek Sulitang (2011) ‘Organic consumers’ trade-offs
between local or imported, conventional or organic products: a qualitative study in
Shanghai’, International Journal of Consumer Studies, 35: 670-78.
Ortega, David L., H. Holly Wang, Laping Wu and Nicole J. Olynk (2011) ‘Modelling
heterogeneity in consumer preferences for select food safety attributes in China’, Food
Policy, 36 (2): 318-324.
Anderson, E.N. (1988) The Food of China. New Haven: Yale University Press. Chapter 7: ‘The
climax of traditional agriculture’, pp. 124-36
Marks, Robert (1996) ‘Commercialization without capitalism: processes of environmental

change in South China, 1550-1850’, Environmental History, 1: 56-82.
Ash, Robert F. and Richard Louis Edmonds (1998) ‘China’s land resources, environment and
agricultural production’, in Richard Louis Edmonds (ed.), Managing the Chinese
Environment. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 114-55.
Shapiro, Judith (2001) Mao’s War Against Nature: Politics and the Environment in
Revolutionary China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hamburger, Jessica (2002) ‘Pesticides in China: a growing threat to food safety, public
health, and the environment’, China Environment Series 5: 29-44.
Smil, Vaclav (2004) China’s Past, China’s Future: Energy, Food, Environment. New York
and London: RoutledgeCurzon. Especially Chapter 3: ‘Food’, pp. 72-140.
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Department of Anthropology & Sociology

Academic Year: 2018/2019

Department Anthropology and Sociology

MA Culture and Society of China (15PANH062)

China is experiencing dynamic changes, and is frequently described as a nation in

Week 1: Anthropology in/of China

Week 2: Globalizing/Localizing Chinese Foodways

Week 3: Social Stratification and Inequality: The Urban-Rural Divide

Week 5: Family and Kinship

(Week 6: Reading week)

Week 7: Commensality, Hospitality and Exchange

Week 8: Popular Religion, Ritual and the State

Week 9: Nationalities, Place-based Identities and ‘Chineseness’

Week 10: Dietary Knowledge and Changing Cultures of Health

Week 11: Social Dimensions of Food Safety

Pieke, Frank (2016) Knowing China: A Twenty-First Century Guide. Cambridge:

Bruckermann, Charlotte and Stephan Feuchtwang (2016) The Anthropology of China:

Review one book from this list:

Zhang, Li (2010) In Search of Paradise: Middle-Class Living in a Chinese Metropolis.

Stafford, Charles (2000) Separation and Reunion in Modern China. Cambridge:

Steinmüller, Hans (2013) Communities of Complicity: Everyday Ethics in Rural China.

Hong, Keelung (1994) ‘Experiences of being a “native” while observing anthropology’,

Wolf, Margery (1992) A Thrice-Told Tale: Feminism, Postmodernism, and Ethnographic

Fardon, Richard (1990) ‘Localizing strategies: the regionalization of ethnographic accounts’,

Morgan, W. John (2014) ‘Fei Xiaotong: a public intellectual in Communist China’,

Chen, Xiaomei. (1995) Occidentalism: The Theory of Counter-Discourse in post-Mao China.

Klein, Jakob A. (2007) ‘Redefining Cantonese cuisine in post-Mao Guangzhou’, Bulletin of

Farrer, James (2015) ‘Shanghai’s Western restaurants as culinary contact zones in a

Mintz, Sidney W. (2007) ‘Asia’s contributions to world cuisine: a beginning enquiry’, in

Chuang, Julia (2015) ‘Urbanization through dispossession: survival and stratification in

Yang, Mingchuan (1994) ‘Reshaping peasant culture and community: rural

Murphy, Rachel (ed.) (2009) Labour Migration and Social Development in

Solinger, Dorothy J. (1999) Contesting Citizenship in Urban China. Berkeley: University

Hsu, Carolyn L. (2005) ‘A taste of “modernity”: working in a western restaurant in market

Pun, Ngai (2003) ‘Subsumption or consumption? The phantom of consumer revolution in

Zhang, Li (2010) In Search of Paradise: Middle-Class Living in a Chinese Metropolis.

Johnson, David (1985) ‘Communication, Class and Consciousness’, in D. Johnson, A.J.

Yan, Yunxiang (1997) ‘The triumph of conjugality: structural transformation of family

Wang, Danning (2010) ‘Intergenerational transmission of family property and family

Watson, James L. (1982) ‘Chinese kinship reconsidered: anthropological perspectives on

Baker, Hugh D. R. (1979) Chinese Family and Kinship. London: MacMillan.

Brandtstädter, Susanne and Gonҫalo Santos (eds) (2009) Chinese Kinship:

Fong, Vanessa L. (2007) ‘Parent-child communication problems and the perceived

Cohen, Myron (1970) ‘Developmental process in the Chinese domestic group’, in

Sangren, P. Steven (1984) ‘Traditional Chinese corporations: beyond kinship’, Journal

Week 6. Reading Week

Stafford, Charles (2000) Separation and Reunion in Modern China. Cambridge:

Sangren, P. Steven (2000) ‘Dialectics of alienation: individuals and collectivities in

Sutton, Donald S. (1995) ‘Consuming counterrevolution: the ritual and culture of

Steinmüller, Hans (2013) Communities of Complicity: Everyday Ethics in Rural China.

Ku Hok-bun (2003) Moral Politics in a Chinese Village: Responsibility, Reciprocity, and

Yan, Yunxiang (2009) The Individualization of Chinese Society (London School of

Walder, Andrew G. (1986) Communist Neo-traditionalism: Work and Authority in Chinese

King, Ambrose Yeo-chi (1994) ‘Kuan-hsi and network building: a sociological

Bunkenborg, Mikkel (2014) ‘From metaphors of empire to enchantments of state:

Special Issue: Ritual, Cultural Standardization, and Orthopraxy in China: Reconsidering

Feuchtwang, Stephan (2001) Popular Religion in China: The Imperial Metaphor.

Feuchtwang, Stephan (2010) The Anthropology of Religion, Charisma and Ghosts:

Hatfield, D.J.W. (2010) Taiwanese Pilgrimage to China: Ritual, Complicity, Community.