Gifts, Favors, and Banquets : The Art of Social Relationships in China / Mayfair Mei-hui Yang.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Yang, Mayfair Mei-hui., author.

Series:

Wilder House series in politics, history, and culture.

The Wilder House series in politics, history, and culture

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Civil society--China.

Communism and individualism--China.

Individualism--China.

Gifts--China.

Social networks--China.

Social interaction--China.

China--Politics and government.

Genre:

Electronic books.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (382 pages).

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Ithaca, N.Y. : Cornell University Press, [2016]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

An elaborate and pervasive set of practices, called guanxi, underlies everyday social relationships in contemporary China. Obtaining and changing job assignments, buying certain foods and consumer items, getting into good hospitals, buying train tickets, obtaining housing, even doing business-all such tasks call for the skillful and strategic giving of gifts and cultivating of obligation, indebtedness, and reciprocity. Mayfair Mei-hui Yang's close scrutiny of this phenomenon serves as a window to view facets of a much broader and more complex cultural, historical, and political formation. Using rich and varied ethnographic examples of guanxi stemming from her fieldwork in China in the 1980s and 1990s, the author shows how this "gift economy" operates in the larger context of the socialist state redistributive economy.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Fieldwork, Polities, and Modernity in China

PART I. An Ethnography of Micropolitics in a Socialist Setting

1. Guanxi Dialects and Vocabulary

2. The Scope and Use-Contexts of Guanxi

3. The "Art" in Guanxixue: Ethics, Tactics, and Etiquette

4. On the Recent Past of Guanxixue: Traditional Forms and Historical (Re-)Emergence

PART II. THEORETICAL FORMULATIONS

5. The Political Economy of Gift Relations

6. "Using the Past to Negate the Present": Ritual Ethics and In State Rationality in Ancient China

7. The Cult of Mao, Guanxi Subjects, and the Return of the Individual

8. Rhizomatic Networks and the Fabric of an Emerging Minjian in China

Conclusion: Back to the Source

Glossary

Chinese and Japanese Bibliography

English Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (p. [334]-359) and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed Feb. 24, 2017)

ISBN:

9781501713040

1501713043

9781501713057

1501713051

OCLC:

1016608157