Steinmüller, Hans 
ORCID: 0000-0002-5921-421X
(2013)
Communities of complicity: everyday ethics in rural China.
Berghahn Books, New York, USA.
ISBN 9780857458902
Abstract
Everyday life in contemporary rural China is characterized by an increased sense of moral challenge and uncertainty. Ordinary people often find themselves caught between the moral frameworks of capitalism, Maoism, and the Chinese tradition. This ethnographic study of the village of Zhongba (in Hubei Province, central China) is an attempt to grasp the ethical reflexivity of everyday life in rural China. Drawing on descriptions of village life, interspersed with targeted theoretical analyses, the author examines how ordinary people construct their own senses of their lives and their futures in everyday activities: building houses, working, celebrating marriages and funerals, gambling, and dealing with local government. The villagers confront moral uncertainty; they creatively harmonize public discourse and local practice; and sometimes they resolve incoherence and unease through the use of irony. In so doing, they perform everyday ethics and re-create transient moral communities at a time of massive social dislocation.
| Item Type: | Book |
|---|---|
| Official URL: | http://www.berghahnbooks.com/ |
| Additional Information: | © 2013 Berghahn Books |
| Divisions: | Anthropology |
| Subjects: | D History General and Old World > DS Asia G Geography. Anthropology. Recreation > GN Anthropology |
| Date Deposited: | 14 Nov 2012 11:16 |
| Last Modified: | 12 Dec 2024 05:29 |
| URI: | http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/46210 |
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