China Urban

China Urban

Ethnographies of Contemporary Culture

  • Author: Chen, Nancy N.; Clark, Constance D.; Gottschang, Suzanne Z.; Jeffery, Lyn; Hoffman, Lisa
  • Publisher: Duke University Press
  • ISBN: 9780822326342
  • eISBN Pdf: 9780822381334
  • Place of publication:  Durham , United States
  • Year of digital publication: 2001
  • Month: March
  • Pages: 349
  • DDC: 307.76/0951
  • Language: English
China Urban is an ethnographic account of China’s cities and the place that urban space holds in China’s imagination. In addition to investigating this nation’s rapidly changing urban landscape, its contributors emphasize the need to rethink the very meaning of the “urban” and the utility of urban-focused anthropological critiques during a period of unprecedented change on local, regional, national, and global levels.

Through close attention to everyday lives and narratives and with a particular focus on gender, market, and spatial practices, this collection stresses that, in the case of China, rural life and the impact of socialism must be considered in order to fully comprehend the urban. Individual essays note the impact of legal barriers to geographic mobility in China, the proliferation of different urban centers, the different distribution of resources among various regions, and the pervasive appeal of the urban, both in terms of living in cities and in acquiring products and conventions signaling urbanity. Others focus on the direct sales industry, the Chinese rock music market, the discursive production of femininity and motherhood in urban hospitals, and the transformations in access to healthcare.

China Urban will interest anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, and those studying urban planning, China, East Asia, and globalization.

Contributors. Tad Ballew, Susan Brownell, Nancy N. Chen, Constance D. Clark, Robert Efird, Suzanne Z. Gottschang, Ellen Hertz, Lisa Hoffman, Sandra Hyde, Lyn Jeffery, Lida Junghans, Louisa Schein, Li Zhang

  • Contents
  • Editor's Acknowledgments
  • Introduction
  • Part One: Xia Hai: Ethnographies of Work and Leisure
    • Lyn Jeffery / Placing Practices: Transnational Network Marketing in Mainland China
    • Lisa Hoffman / Guiding College Graduates to Work: Social Constructions of Labor Markets in Dalian
    • Robert Efird / Rock in a Hard Place: Music and the Market in Nineties Beijing
  • Part Two: Gender, Bodies, and Consumer Culture
    • Suzanne Z. Gottschang / The Consuming Mother: Infant Feeding and the Feminine Body in Urban China
    • Constance D. Clark / Foreign Marriage, "Tradition", and the Politics of Border Crossings
    • Susan Brownell / Making Dream Bodies in Beijing: Athletes, Fashion Models, and Urban Mystique in China
    • Sandra Teresa Hyde / Sex Tourism Practices on the Periphery: Eroticizing Ethnicity and Pathologizing Sex on the Lancang
  • Part Three: Negotiating Urban Spaces
    • Nancy N. Chen / Health, Wealth, and the Good Life
    • Lida Junghans / Railway Workers between Plan and Market
    • Li Zhang / Contesting Crime, Order, and Migrant Spaces in Beijing
  • Part Four: Expressions of the Urban
    • Louisa Schein / Urbanity, Cosmopolitanism, Consumption
    • Tad Ballew / Xiaxiang for the '90s: The Shanghai TV Rural Channel and Post-Mao Urbanity amid Global Swirl
    • Ellen Hertz / Face in the Crowd: The Cultural Construction of Anonymity in Urban China
  • Bibliography
  • Contributors
  • Index

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