Description
Book SynopsisOffers an account of China's cities and the place that urban space holds in China's imagination. This book emphasises the need to rethink the very meaning of the "urban" and the utility of urban-focused anthropological critiques during a period of unprecedented change on local, regional, national, and global levels.
Trade Review“
China Urban brings together some of the best new ethnographic work on the changing dynamics of time, space, and place in 1990s China. These essays take the reader into a wide range of localities, but always with an eye turned toward larger national and global transformations.
China Urban also speaks to a wide range of debates in contemporary
social and political theory, and it offers an innovative approach to the study of the urban in postsocialist China and elswhere. This volume is long overdue.”—Ralph Litzinger, author of
Other Chinas: The Yao and the Politics of National Belonging“For readers interested in the intersections of space, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity, this book has a wealth of insights to ponder. And for those interested in the complexity, vibrancy, and challenges of today’s urban and urbanizing China, this book’s the ticket.”—Greg Guldin, author of
What’s a Peasant to Do? Village Becoming Town in Southern ChinaTable of ContentsEditors' Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part One. Xia Hai: The Ethnographies of Work and Leisure
Placing Practices: Transnational Network Marketing in Mainland China / Lyn Jeffery
Guiding College Graduates to Work: Social Constructions of Labor Markets in Dalian / Lisa Hoffman
Rock in a Hard Place: Music and the Market in Nineties Beijing / Robert Efird
Part Two. Gender, Bodies, and Consumer Culture
The Consuming Mother: Infant Feeding and the Feminine Body in Urban China / Suzanne Z. Gottschang
Foreign Marriage, “Tradition,” and the Politics of Border Crossings / Constance Clark
Making Dream Bodies in Beijing: Athletes, Fashion Models, and Urban Mystique in China / Susan Brownell
Sex Tourism Practices on the Periphery: Eroticizing Ethnicity and Pathologizing Sex on the Lancang / Sandra Teresa Hyde
Part Three. Negotiating Urban Spaces
Health, Wealth, and the Good Life / Nancy N. Chen
Railway Workers between Plan and Market / Lida Junghans
Contesting Crime, Order, and Migrant Spaces in Beijing / Li Zhang
Part Four. Expressions of the Urban
Urbanity, Cosmopolitanism, Consumption / Louisa Schein
Xiaxiang for the ‘90s: The Shanghai TV Rural Channel and Post-Mao Urbanity Amid Global Swirl / Tad Ballew
Face in the Crowd: The Cultural Construction of Anonymity in Urban China / Ellen Hertz
Bibliography
Contributors
Index
