Private Life under Socialism: Love, Intimacy, and Family Change in a Chinese Village, 1949-1999

Yunxiang Yan

Published by Stanford University Press 2003

Private Life under Socialism

Love, Intimacy, and Family Change in a Chinese Village, 1949-1999

Yunxiang Yan

https://doi.org/10.1515/9780804764117

Overview
Contents

About this book

For seven years in the 1970s, the author lived in a village in northeast China as an ordinary farmer. In 1989, he returned to the village as an anthropologist to begin the unparalleled span of eleven years’ fieldwork that has resulted in this book—a comprehensive, vivid, and nuanced account of family change and the transformation of private life in rural China from 1949 to 1999. The author’s focus on the personal and the emotional sets this book apart from most studies of the Chinese family. Yan explores private lives to examine areas of family life that have been largely overlooked, such as emotion, desire, intimacy, privacy, conjugality, and individuality. He concludes that the past five decades have witnessed a dual transformation of private life: the rise of the private family, within which the private lives of individual women and men are thriving.

Author / Editor information

Yunxiang Yan is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of The Flow of Gifts: Reciprocity and Social Networks in a Chinese Village (Stanford, 1996).

Reviews

"This ethnographic study should be in every academic library."

William Jankowiak, University of Nevada:
"This may well prove to be the finest rural ethnography of a Chinese village ever written. By focusing on the emotional domain, Yan invites his readers to engage ethnographically in a new domain of scholarly exploration and analysis. In so doing, he has made the Chinese more human. It is a wonderful study."

Matthew Z. Noellert:
"While the majority of the world views contemporary China as the single most formidable economic force on the planet, threatening to define a new age, anthropologists of China are taking a characteristically contrary approach by studying the deeply personal and emotional social worlds of various Chinese communities . . . Yan directly challenges the entrenched theory of the Chinese family as a corporate enterprise in which the the economic self-interest of the domestic group is the driving force of development."

Journal of Asian Studies:
"Throughout this well-researched and highly original book, Yan has once again demonstrated his unusual ethnographic sensitivity and fine ability to capture the multilayered micropolitics of changing rural social life."

Canadian Journal of History:
" . . . Yan contributes tremendously to the field of China studies by empirically countering a number of its dominant and discriminatory assumptions."

American Historical Review:
"...a thought provoking book..."

H.T. Wong:
"In probably the best micro-examination of Chinese society in transition, Yan goes beyond the three conventional topologies of treating the Chinese family as a cultural, economic, and political unit. His focus on the personal and emotional aspects of Chinese families separates this book from the conventional emphasis on structure and collectivism."

Population and Development Review:
"Beautifully crafted, this study provides a sobering look at changes in rural Chinese family life, while shedding rare light on the inner moral and emotional world of the Chinese villager."

Deborah Davis:
"The best ethnography of rural China in the 1990s, this important book is about a rarely explored but central dimension of Chinese family life. Yan also places his study of private life directly in the center of classic debates about the character and importance of corporate kinship. It takes years of sharing villagers' lives to see beneath the surface. Yan lived it, and he brings deep understanding to both the narrative and the analysis."

China Quarterly:
"When Yunxiang Yan's first book, The Flow of Gifts, was published in 1996 it was immediately clear that a new leading scholar of contemporary Chinese society had entered the scene. Yan's second book Private Life Under Socialism richly delivers on the promise of his first. This new book is, in fact, very much a companion volume to The Flow of Gifts. Together, they constitute a uniquely rich ethnography of the intimate details of social life as lived and experienced in the village where Yan himself spent 15 years of his life before becoming an anthropologist."

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Figures Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
Tables Publicly Available Download PDF	x
Preface Publicly Available Download PDF	xi
Introduction: The Chinese Family and the Study of Private Life Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
CHAPTER ONE The Changing Local World: Political Economy, Public Life, and Social Networks Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	17
CHAPTER TWO Youth Autonomy and Romance in Courtship Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	42
CHAPTER THREE Sex, Intimacy, and the Language of Love Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	64
CHAPTER FOUR Gender Dynamics and the Triumph of Conjugal Power Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	86
CHAPTER FIVE Domestic Space and the Quest for Privacy Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	112
CHAPTER SIX The Politics of Family Property Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	140
CHAPTER SEVEN Support for the Elderly and the Crisis of Filial Piety Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	162
CHAPTER EIGHT Birth Control and the Making of a New Fertility Culture Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	190
Conclusion: The Socialist State, the Private Family, and the Uncivil Individual Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	217
Character List Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	237
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	243
Bibliography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	267
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	283

Language: English
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Audience: College/higher education;
Pages
- Main content: 320
Illustrations
- Illustrations: 21
- Other: 21 illustrations

eBook

Published: March 12, 2003
ISBN: 9780804764117