Gonçalo D. Santos

The anthropology of Chinese kinship. A critical overview

This is a critical overview of the anthropology of Chinese kinship focusing on the twentieth-century Euro-American literature. I first deal with the less well-known early literature of the period before the foundation and closure of the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) in 1949. I then show how the thematic and theoretical heterogeneity of this early literature was superseded during the 1960s and 1970s by a powerful but reductive paradigmatic lineage model of Chinese kinship and society, largely derived from documentary-based studies of lineage organisation in the late imperial period and consolidated through field research in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Inspired by earlier critics of this lineage-model, tuned in to new anthropological trends in the field of kinship studies and triggered by the post-Mao opening of the PRC, the 1990s marked the beginning of a very heterogeneous cycle of renovation generated by new field research. Seen as a whole, this current cycle of renovation has been undertaking a revision of the older descent-centred comparative view of Chinese kinship and is giving important insights to current anthropological debates about the nature of human kinship.

Fertility decline in rural China: a comparative analysis

Many models have been proposed to explain both the rapidity of China’s fertility decline after the 1960s and the differential timing of the decline in different places. In particular, scholars argue over whether deliberate policies of fertility control, institutional changes, or general modernization factors contribute most to changes in fertility behavior. Here the authors adopt an ethnographically grounded behavioral—institutional approach to analyze qualitative and quantitative data from three different rural settings: Xiaoshan County in Zhejiang (East China), Ci County in Hebei (North China), and Yingde County in Guangdong (South China). The authors show that no one set of factors explains the differential timing and rapidity of the fertility decline in the three areas; rather they must explain differential timing by a combination of differences in social—cultural environments (e.g., spread of education, reproductive ideologies, and gender relations) and politico-economic conditions (e.g., economic development, birth planning campaigns, and collective systems of labor organization) during the early phases of the fertility decline.

The birth of physical anthropology in late imperial Portugal

In this article I analyze the emergence of the field of physical anthropology in the metropolitan academic sphere of the Portuguese Empire during the late nineteenth century. I suggest that Portugal’s relatively peripheral position combined with a complex internal conjuncture of political instability and economic impotence gave early Portuguese physical anthropology a less explicitly “colonial” orientation than in other, more central Western European imperial powers. I describe the various national and international exchanges leading to the birth of this naturalist anthropological tradition at the University of Coimbra, drawing particular attention to the foundational role played by the technological assemblage of large osteological collections aimed at the study of the somatic characteristics of the metropolitan “white” population. I situate these technical developments in the context of wider sociocultural and politico-economic processes of both “nation building” and “empire building.” These processes had a strong effect on the kinds of questions asked and the kinds of answers that seemed compelling and acceptable to early physical anthropologists.

On Intimate Choices and Troubles in Rural South China

This article explores how marriage practices and intimate relations are being refashioned in reform-era China in the context of increasingly entangled intersections between private negotiations and public dialogues in law, state policy, science, and the media. Based on long-term field research in impoverished rural areas, the article focuses on the intersections between intimate practices of the everyday and large-scale projects of social engineering aimed at turning ordinary ‘peasants’ into ‘modern civilized citizens’. The article draws particular attention to the important role played by the Birth Planning Policy in shaping local reproductive practices and intimate structures, but the approach developed here to make sense of the impact of globalized neo-Malthusian state interventions on local realities considers also the perspective and the agency of ordinary individuals and communities. Instead of assuming that changes in local practices follow primarily from the impact of external forces such as state policies and technologies of birth planning, the article suggests that local practices and global forces co-produce each other through ‘frictions’ of various kinds. This focus on the micro-macro intersections of what I call here the ‘techno-politics of intimacy’ joins recent efforts in the humanities and social sciences to move beyond conventional top-down approaches to global intimate transformations.

Rethinking the Green Revolution in South China: Technological Materialities and Human-Environment Relations

This article revisits the question of the impact of the Green Revolution in the rice-farming region of South China, combining historical and anthropological approaches to technological transformation. The article describes the Chinese “traditional” practice of small-scale wet-rice farming as a technological system and provides detailed microhistorical data on the various kinds of social and material transformations operated on this “traditional” system by the communist Green Revolution. Particular attention is given to technological materialities, including the physical actions of rice technologies on the material world and the physical aspects of rice technologies (or the way they are made and used). The articles main theoretical goal is to develop an approach to technological transformation that brings the study of human-environment relations more firmly onto the study of technological materialities and technological systems. It is suggested that all technological systems are eco-technological systems, that is, ecologically grounded human-built environments.