Communities of Complicity: Everyday Ethics in Rural China

284 Pages·2013·2.783 MB·English

by  Hans Steinmüller

Communities of CompliCity
DISLOCATIONS
General Editors: August Carbonella, Memorial University of Newfoundland,
Don Kalb, University of Utrecht & Central European University, Linda Green,
University of Arizona
The immense dislocations and suffering caused by neoliberal globalization,
the retreat of the welfare state in the last decades of the twentieth century, and
the heightened military imperialism at the turn of the twenty-first century
have raised urgent questions about the temporal and spatial dimensions of
power. Through stimulating critical perspectives and new and cross-disciplinary
frameworks that reflect recent innovations in the social and human
sciences, this series provides a forum for politically engaged and theoretically
imaginative responses to these important issues of late modernity.
Volume 1
Where Have All the Homeless Gone?: The Making and Unmaking of a Crisis
Anthony Marcus
Volume 2
Blood and Oranges: European Markets and Immigrant Labor in Rural Greece
Christopher M. Lawrence
Volume 3
Struggles for Home: Violence, Hope and the Movement of People
Edited by Stef Jansen and Staffan Löfving
Volume 4
Slipping Away: Banana Politics and Fair Trade in the Eastern Caribbean
Mark Moberg
Volume 5
Made in Sheffield: An Ethnography of Industrial Work and Politics
Massimiliano Mollona
Volume 6
Biopolitics, Militarism, and Development: Eritrea in the Twenty-First Century
Edited by David O’Kane and Tricia Redeker Hepner
Volume 7
When Women Held the Dragon’s Tongue and Other Essays in Historical Anthropology
Hermann Rebel
Volume 8
Class, Contention, and a World in Motion
Edited by Winnie Lem and Pauline Gardiner Barber
Volume 9
Crude Domination: An Anthropology of Oil
Edited by Andrea Behrends, Stephen P. Reyna, and Günther Schlee
C C
ommunities of ompliCity
Everyday Ethics in Rural China
Hans Steinmüller
_
Berghahn Books
NEW YORK • OXFORD
First published in 2013 by
Berghahn Books
www.berghahnbooks.com
© 2013 Hans Steinmüller
All rights reserved.
Except for the quotation of short passages
for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book
may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or
mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information
storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented,
without written permission of the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
CCIrPud De dAoTmAin aTtiOon B: aEn SanUthProPpLolIoEgDy of oil / edited by Andrea Behrends,
Stephen P. Reyna, and  Günther Schlee.
       p. cm. --  (Dislocations v.9)  
Includes bibliographical references and index.
  ISBN 978-0-85745-255-9 (hardback : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-0-85745-256-6
(e-book)
1.  Petroleum industry and trade--Social aspects. 2.  Petroleum industry and
trade--Cross-cultural studies. 3.  Social responsibility of business. 4.  Human
rights and globalization. 5.  Culture and globalization.  I. Behrends, Andrea.
II. Reyna, Stephen P. III. Schlee, Günther
HD9560.5.C78 2011
338.2’7282--dc22
2011014624
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Printed in the United States on acid-free paper
ISBN 978-0-85745-890-2 (hardback)
ISBN 978-0-85745-891-9 (ebook)
Le quotidien, c’est l’humble et le solide, ce qui va de soi, ce dont les parties et frag-
ments s’enchainent dans un emploi du temps. Et ceci sans qu’on (l’intéressé) ait à
examiner les articulations de ces parties. C’est donc de qui ne porte pas de date.
C’est l’insignifiant (apparemment) ; il occupe et préoccupe et pourtant il n’a pas
besoin d’être dit, éthique sous-jacente à l’emploi tu temps, esthétique du décor
de ce temps employé. Ce qui rejoint la modernité. Par ce mot il faut entendre ce
qui porte le signe du neuf et de la nouveauté : la brillance, le paradoxal, marque
par la technicité ou la mondanité. C’est l’audacieux (apparemment), l’éphémère,
l’aventure qui se proclame et se fait acclamer. C’est l’art et l’esthétisme, mal dis-
cernables dans les spectacles que donne le monde dit moderne et dans le spectacle
de soi qu’il se donne à lui-même. Or chacun, le quotidien et le moderne, marque et
masque l’autre, le légitime et le compense.
Henri Lefebvre, La Vie Quotidienne dans le Monde Moderne

C
ontents
List of Illustrations viii
Acknowledgements x
Notes on the Text xiii
Introduction 1
Chapter 1 A Remote Place from Three Angles 36
Chapter 2 Gabled Roofs and Concrete Ceilings 67
Chapter 3 Work Through the Food Basket 98
Chapter 4 Channelling Along a Centring Path 130
Chapter 5 The Embarrassment of Li 154
Chapter 6 Gambling and the Moving Boundaries of
Social Heat 176
Chapter 7 Face Projects in Rural Construction 198
Communities of Complicity 217
Conclusion: Everyday Ethics, Cultural Intimacy, and Irony 223
Appendix A: Newspaper Report 234
Appendix B: Expenses for the Construction of a House 238
Appendix C: List of Money Gifts and Tasks 240
Appendix D: Subsidies Given to Three Households 242
Glossary 244
Bibliography 257
l i
ist of llustrations
Photographs 
All the photographs were taken by the author, except pictures A.1 and A.2,
taken by Enshi Evening News.
1.1 The Valley of Bashan 46
1.2 The Memorial Arch 53
2.1 The ‘houses of hanging legs’ (diaojiao lou) were the most 70
common architectural style of farm houses until recently
2.2 A ‘Western house’ (yanglou) or ‘small comfortable house’ 71
(xiaokang lou)
2.3 The structure of the columns and the roof is built first, 77
and only later walls are inserted
3.1 The stubborn old man 99
3.2 The periodical market of Bashan 104
3.3 Bashan Slope 106
3.4 Picking Tea 112
4.1 A traditional house altar with the scroll ‘heaven, earth, 143
emperor, ancestors, and teachers’
4.2 The meal for the ‘high relatives’ (gao qin) 143
5.1 Guiding a child to kow-tow in front of grandmother’s 155
coffin
5.2 Preparing the offer of a pig and a goat (E. zhu yang ji) for 159
the funeral of the mother-in-law
6.1 Just for fun (hao wan’r) 183
6.2 The shaofo game 188
7.1 The Model Household 207
8.1 A friendship across Ages 231
A.1 Shi Han does research to understand the situation of 236
peasant families
A.2 Carrying a bamboo basket, he participates in farm work 237
– viii –
List of Illustrations | ix
Maps
1.1 Enshi, Hubei, neighbouring provinces, and major cities 37
1.2 Hubei Province 38
1.3 Zhongba, Bashan, and the surrounding villages 52
Tables
2.1 Comparison of Wooden and Brick Houses 91
3.1 Production of Staple Crops and Cash Crops in Bashan 105
Township
4.1 List of Tasks at a Family Celebration 140
Figures
2.1 Basic Floor Plan and Central Axis of a House 72
2.2 The Central Axis and the Ridgepole at the House 85
Inauguration
4.1 Seating Order at a Formal Banquet 144
a
Cknowledgements
My greatest debt is to the people of Bashan who welcomed me into their
homes and made it possible for me to call Bashan my ‘second home’ (di er
guxiang). I sincerely hope that if anyone from Bashan ever reads this, he or
she will feel that I have done justice to the complexity of everyday ethics
there. I should also like to thank all those competent men and women in
the prefecture, city, township and village governments, who in their posi-
tion as representatives of state and party received and hosted me.
To respect their privacy, I use pseudonyms for all names of persons
and of places below the prefectural level. I have called the village where I
have spent most of my time ‘Zhongba’, which is literally ‘central platform’
or ‘central flatland’ in English – central as it is for its inhabitants in several
senses that will become apparent. The township to which Zhongba be-
longs I call ‘Bashan’, that is the ‘Ba mountain’, ‘Ba’ being an ancient place
name of this region.
My PhD studies and research were funded by an ESRC 1+3 Quota Stu-
dentship, a research bursary of the Universities’ China Committee in Lon-
don, and the Raymond and Rosemarie Firth Award of the Department of
Anthropology at the LSE; for all this support I am very grateful.
In Beijing, I owe a great deal to Zhang Xiaojun for arranging my fellow-
ship at the Department for Sociology at Tsinghua University. Under his
guidance, I was able to make my first careful steps in Chinese academia,
and teach my first course at university level. I have benefitted immensely
from the discussions with him and his students. Wang Liru, Jason Li, and
Duan Qiuli worked hard with me to improve my Chinese. Cai Ayi and
Zhang Zhongyang, Chen Naihua, Hu Guanyu, Meng Wei, and Sa La sup-
ported me in different ways in Beijing. To all of them I am very grateful,
but most of all to Guo Yan and all the members of the Guo family in Bei-
jing and London.
Around China, many people hosted me generously in their native plac-
es: Long Tao and his parents in Changsha, Wu Liang and his parents in
Dongyuan, and Xu Chenlin in Shanghai. Twenty years after I had first
met him, Lü Yuansheng received me in Qiandaohu to complete another
exchange between Bavaria and Zhejiang. In Madian, Zhong Rumei, Xiang