Gifts, Favors, and Banquets

by Yang, Mayfair Mei-Hui

• ISBN13: 9780801495922
• ISBN10: 080149592X
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1994-08-01
• Publisher: Cornell Univ Pr

Summary

An elaborate and pervasive set of practices, called guanxi, underlies everyday social relationships in contemporary China. Obtaining and changing job assignments, buying certain foods and consumer items, getting into good hospitals, buying train tickets, obtaining housing, even doing business-all such tasks call for the skillful and strategic giving of gifts and cultivating of obligation, indebtedness, and reciprocity. Mayfair Mei-hui Yang's close scrutiny of this phenomenon serves as a window to view facets of a much broader and more complex cultural, historical, and political formation. Using rich and varied ethnographic examples of guanxi stemming from her fieldwork in China in the 1980s and 1990s, the author shows how this "gift economy" operates in the larger context of the socialist state redistributive economy.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Fieldwork, Politics, and Modernity in China	p. 1
The "Discovery" of Guanxixue	p. 1
Guanxixue as an Object of Study	p. 6
Fieldwork in a Culture of Fear	p. 15
The Subject-Position of the Anthropologist	p. 25
State Projects of Modernity in China and Native Critiques	p. 31
Guanxi Dialects and Vocabulary	p. 49
Popular Discourse	p. 51
Official Discourse	p. 58
Key Words and Concepts of Guanxixue in Popular Discourse	p. 64
The Scope and Use-Contexts of Guanxi	p. 75
The City and the Countryside	p. 75
The Gender Dimension	p. 78
Urban Occupational Strata	p. 85
The Variety of Use-Contexts	p. 91
A Society of Gatekeepers	p. 99
Corporate and Administrative Uses	p. 101
The "Art" in Guanxixue: Ethics, Tactics, and Etiquette	p. 109
Guanxi Bases: Kinship, Friendship, and Other Personal Relations	p. 111
Affective Sentiments: Yiqi, Ganqing, and Renqing	p. 119
Enlarging a Guanxi Network	p. 123
The Tactic, Obligation, and Form of Giving and Receiving	p. 126
The Obligation to Repay	p. 139
On the Recent Past of Guanxixue: Traditional Forms and Historical (Re-)Emergence	p. 146
Three Official Histories	p. 146
Guanxixue and Chinese Culture	p. 148
The Postrevolutionary Decline and Rise of Guanxixue	p. 153
From "Use-Value" to "Exchange-Value": The Entrance of Market Forces	p. 159
The Art of Guanxi Does Not Retreat	p. 166
The Political Economy of Gift Relations	p. 177
The Techniques of Power in the State Redistributive Economy	p. 179
Countertechniques in the Gift Economy	p. 188
Propositions	p. 204
"Using the Past to Negate the Present": Ritual Ethics and State Rationality in Ancient China	p. 209
"Criticize Lin Biao, Criticize Confucius"	p. 210
A Reinterpretation of the Past	p. 216
The Cult of Mao, Guanxi Subjects, and the Return of the Individual	p. 245
A Sweep of Red: State Subjects and the Cult of Mao	p. 247
The Return of the Individual Subject	p. 276
Guanxi Subjectivity of Addition and Subtraction	p. 281
Rhizomatic Networks and the Fabric of an Emerging Minjian in China	p. 287
In-between the Individual and Society	p. 295
In-between the Individual and Groups or Associations	p. 300
Rhizomatic Kinship and Guanxi Polity: From Guanxi Networks to a Minjian	p. 305
Conclusion: Back to the Source	p. 312
The Female Supple Force of Exchange	p. 312
Ritual as a Self-organizing Vehicle of the Minjian	p. 317
Renqing over Guanxi	p. 320
Glossary	p. 323
Chinese and Japanese Bibliography	p. 334
English Bibliography	p. 341
Index	p. 361
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