Charlotte Bruckermann

Trading on Tradition Tourism, Ritual, and Capitalism in a Chinese Village

“Culture” has become a resource to be excavated and marketed for profit throughout China in recent decades. This article investigates processes underlying the production of culture through the example of a Star Worshipping Festival staged by a tourism company in a Shanxi mountain village. Regional political economy, historical knowledge, and ritual practices underlie strategies of development that transformed the entire village into a new cultural product revolving around Ancient Fortress culture. Despite a shared vision of culture as a resource, conflicting spheres of interest emerged between villagers and the drivers of development. A tourism company selectively mobilized aspects of villagers’ cultural practices to create a historical narrative legitimizing Ancient Fortress culture. By promoting Star Worshipping as a cultural display, the tour company projected Ancient Fortress culture onto the entire village, thereby denying villagers the capacity to stake claims over the present profits and future governance of this new cultural product.

Caring claims and the relational self across time: grandmothers overcoming reproductive crises in rural China

Revisiting the notion of relational personhood from a Chinese perspective, this article explores the premises of exchange underlying discourses of care, reproduction, and kinship in anthropology. Grandmothers contribute much of the care needed for reproduction of the next generation of children in the Chinese countryside. Their motivation to contribute care to secure offspring stems from the frustration of their past familial desires, and their hopes for transcendence through reproduction in the future. Grandmothers secure claims to offspring through their care between the interstices of the state bureaucracy and patrilineal norms. This care is not simply nurturing but can also become coercive and competitive. As Chinese grandmothers overcome past reproductive hardships by claiming future offspring through care, their selfhood not only becomes distributed through exchange with others, but also is dispersed across time in relation to past experiences and future aspirations of the self.