Emptiness and fullness : ethnographies of lack and desire in contemporary China

Author(s)

    • Bregnbæk, Susanne
    • Bunkenborg, Mikkel

Bibliographic Information

Emptiness and fullness : ethnographies of lack and desire in contemporary China

edited by Susanne Bregnbæk and Mikkel Bunkenborg

(Studies in social analysis / general editor, Martin Holbraad, v. 2)

Berghahn Books, 2017

  • : hbk

Available at  / 2 libraries

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Note

Includes bibliographical references and index

Description and Table of Contents

Description

As critical voices question the quality, authenticity, and value of people, goods, and words in post-Mao China, accusations of emptiness render things open to new investments of meaning, substance, and value. Exploring the production of lack and desire through fine-grained ethnography, this volume examines how diagnoses of emptiness operate in a range of very different domains in contemporary China: In the ostensibly meritocratic exam system and the rhetoric of officials, in underground churches, housing bubbles, and nationalist fantasies, in bodies possessed by spirits and evaluations of jade, there is a pervasive concern with states of lack and emptiness and the contributions suggest that this play of emptiness and fullness is crucial to ongoing constructions of quality, value, and subjectivity in China.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations Introduction Mikkel Bunkenborg and Susanne Bregnbaek Chapter 1. China's Examination Fever and the Fabrication of Fairness: "My Generation was Raised on Poison Milk" Zachary M. Howlett Chapter 2. Guanhua! Beijing Students, Authoritative Discourse, and the Ritual Production of Political Compliance Anders Sybrandt Hansen Chapter 3. Interior Spaces of Hope: Inner Selves, Intersubjectivity, and Agency among Chinese Christians in Beijing Susanne Bregnbaek Chapter 4. The Tower and The Tower: Excess and Vacancy in China's Ghost Cities Michael Alexander Ulfstjerne Chapter 5. The Manchu in the Mirror: The Emptiness of Identity and the Fullness of Conspiracy Theory Kevin Carrico Chapter 6. Empty Diseases and Horror Vacui in Rural Hebei Mikkel Bunkenborg Chapter 7. The Potentials of Feicui: Indeterminacy and Determination in Human-Jade Interactions in South-West China Henrik Kloppenborg Moller Index

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