Mayfair Mei-Hui Yang

The Resilience of Guanxi and its New Deployments: A Critique of Some New Guanxi Scholarship

In addressing claims that the art of guanxi is declining in Chinas current incorporation of capitalism, this article argues that guanxi must be treated historically as a repertoire of cultural patterns and resources which are continuously transformed in their adaptation to, as well as shaping of, new social institutions and structures, and by the particular Chinese experience with globalization. The article takes issue with approaches which treat guanxi as a fixed essentialized phenomenon which can only wither away with the onslaught of new legal and commercial regimes. Rather, as the examples of Taiwan and post-socialist Russias encounter with capitalism suggest, guanxi practice may decline in some social domains, but find new areas to flourish, such as business transactions, and display new social forms and expressions. This historical approach to guanxi , which is sensitive to issues of power both within the Chinese social order and between China and the West, is especially critical of the unreflective positivist methodology and the teleology of modernization theory/narrative and neo-liberal discourse embedded in the argument for the decline of guanxi .

The Gift Economy and State Power in China

The state apparatus in China today has taken upon itself almost total responsibility for administering the social and economic domain. The welfare and control of the population, the organization of production, planning all social activities, and the distribution of the means of subsistence have become primary concerns of organs of the state. The types of power relationships and their social and symbolic expressions, which have crystallized around the distribution and circulation of desirables in such a political economy, are the subject of the present study. The study will also examine how certain counter-techniques of power deviate from the larger strategy of power exercised through the state socialist political economy, forming pockets of intransigence from within.

Putting Global Capitalism in Its Place: Economic Hybridity, Bataille, and Ritual Expenditure

This exceedingly interesting paper takes as its starting point J. K. Gibson-Graham’s exhortation to find new theoretical languages to explain capitalism’s supposed triumph without reproducing the self-justificatory narratives of its inevitability and global dominance. Yang crafts such a theoretical language, using tools derived from Bataille, Baudrillard, and Bakhtin and through an insightful and nuanced analysis of apparently “irrational” ritual expenditures in Wenzhou, a region often touted in the press as a success story of capitalism and free markets in the “new China.” Specifically, Yang develops two models. One is a model of ritual expenditure that attends to the sacralization of the putatively economic. It is meant to address the shortcomings of other models of peasant economies, the author arguing that peasant economies are never, strictly speaking, merely economic. The other is a model of economic hybridity that directly answers Gibson-Graham’s call for a critique of global capitalism as all-conquering and capitalist economic development as a one-way street. This model is meant to address the shortcomings of the articulation of- modes-of-production models of an earlier moment in economic anthropology.

Putting Global Capitalism in Its Place

This article takes up J. K. Gibson‐Graham’s call for a theoretical move away from a model of monolithic global capitalism and notions of one‐way “penetration” of capitalism. The notion of “economic hybridity” (derived from Bakhtin’s writing on linguistic hybridity) is proposed as an alternative to the Marxist concept of “articulation of modes of production” to account for the coming together of economic logics and practices from different epochs and cultural histories. The ethnography that sustains this discussion addresses the significance of popular religious revival in rural Wenzhou, on the southeast coast of China, and its role in the postsocialist market economy. Borrowing from Georges Bataille’s notion of “ritual expenditure” and from early Baudrillard on symbolic economies, the case study shows that rural Wenzhou’s ritual economy harbors an archaic economic logic which is subversive of capitalist, state socialist, and developmental‐state principles. The older strains of an alternative economic logic in this hybrid are shown not as complementing, adapting to, or serving capitalism’s expansion but as contesting it and rechanneling its movement toward other ends.

The Lineage-Village Complex in Southeastern China: A Long Footnote in the Anthropology of Kinship [and Comments and Reply]

The A. attempts to evaluate the current litterature on descent and lineage organization in China and its significance for anthropological discussions of kinship theory. Despite increasing anthropological skepticism over the applicability of lineage theory and the corresponding decline of interest in unilineal descent, the existence of lineage organizations has been an unchallenged fact for anthropologists and historians of China, in turn offering explicit support for lineage theory. Recent historical research has shed light on the diversity of Chinese kin organization over time and space for the most part without questioning the model itself. While the A. does not contest the existence of lineages in China, he argues that the historical conditions of their evolution squarely contradict the theoretical principles upon which lineage theory has been constructed

Shamanism and Spirit Possession in Chinese Modernity: Some Preliminary Reflections on a Gendered Religiosity of the Body

Recent fieldwork in rural and small-town Wenzhou reveals that shamans, ritual healers, and spirit mediums have reemerged in the post-Mao era, slowing a long decline that may have started with the ascendancy of Neo-Confucianism in the Ming and Qing Dynasties, and that was exacerbated by Maoist-era suppressions. Unlike the shamanistic cultures of contemporary Taiwan, Fujian, and Chinese ethnic enclaves in Southeast Asia, and what we know of China in late imperial times, most spirit mediums in Wenzhou today are women who do not engage in the bloody and violent public ritual performances found in those areas where male shamans predominate. This article reflects upon four possible explanations for the modern animosity toward shamanism and spirit possession by Chinese officialdom and mainstream Chinese society today. It suggests that the fourth possible explanation, one focusing on the bodily performances and gender of shamans, has not been adequately explored in the study of Chinese shamanism. This fourth explanation deserves attention in any future studies of spirit possession in contemporary China, as it does not treat China as an isolated case of shamanism in the world, but places Chinese shamanism in the larger global context of a shared reconfiguration of the human body in global modernity.巫術與中國現代性：有関性别與身體宗教性的初步探討摘要近期在溫州農村和小鎮的實地考察显示出巫術、巫醫和靈媒在後毛澤東時代再次出現，減緩了其經歷明清時期新儒學佔據統治地位，和毛澤東時代壓制形成的長期下降趨勢。與同時期台灣、福建和其他華裔生活的東南亞地區，以及我們所熟知的中華帝國晚期的巫術文化不同，如今在溫州大部分的靈媒都是女性，並且，她們沒有像男巫師一樣在她們主導的剬開宗教儀式裡進行血腥和暴力的禮儀行為。本篇論文探討了四個可能的原因，解釋當今中國官方和主流社會對巫術和靈媒的反感和憎惡。文章中提出的第四個原因，關於巫師儀式表演和巫師的性別問題，至今未在有關中國巫術的研究中被深入挖掘。因此，這個問題需要在今後研究現代中國的靈魂控制等相關課題時得到更多的重視，不應把中國巫術作為一個孤立的個案，而應該把中國巫術研究放在更大的全球環境中，共同探討其在全球現代化中身體構造的重新組合。