An intimate look at twenty-first century households in rural China
A Escola De Antropologia De Coimbra, 1885-1950
Chinese Village Life Today
Building Families in an Age of Transition
Author: Gonçalo Santos
China has undergone a remarkable process of urbanization, but a significant portion of its citizens still live in rural villages. To gain better access to jobs, health care, and consumer goods, villagers often travel or migrate to cities, and that cyclical transit and engagement with new technoscientific and medical practices is transforming village life. In this thoughtful ethnography, Gonçalo Santos paints a richly detailed portrait of one rural township in Guangdong Province, north of the industrialized Pearl River Delta region.
Unlike previous studies of rural-urban relations and migration in China, Chinese Village Life Today―based on Santos’s more than twenty years of field research―starts from a rural community’s point of view rather than the perspective of major urban centers. Santos considers the intimate choices of village families in the face of larger forces of modernization, showing how these negotiations shape the configuration of daily village life, from marriage, childbirth, and childcare to personal hygiene and public sanitation. Santos also outlines the advantages of a rural existence, including a degree of autonomy over family planning and community life that is rare in urban China. Filled with vivid anecdotes and keen observations, this book presents a fresh perspective on China’s urban-rural divide and a grounded theoretical approach to rural transformation.
Advance Praise
“An important ethnography that will be well received by a broad audience of readers: anthropologists, sociologists, historians, demographers, and medical researchers.”
James Watson
Harvard University
“Santos’s ‘translocal’ focus provides an added dimension that is not currently available in other texts, and we also get the kind of ‘thick description’ that is the hallmark of the very best ethnography.”
Ellen Oxfeld
author of Bitter and Sweet: Food, Meaning, and Modernity in Rural China
“Based on rich data and insights from his longitudinal fieldwork of more than two decades, Santos offers a brilliant bottom-up approach to unpack the impacts of technocratic power from the state and the market, revealing the intimate choices of Chinese individuals in the context of heightened moral tensions and divisions. Deeply engaging and stunningly inspiring, this excellent ethnography stands out as both cutting edge and abiding!”
Yunxiang Yan
author of Private Life under Socialism: Love, Intimacy, and Family Change in a Chinese Village, 1949–1999
Reviews
“[A]n excellent record of the effects of Chinese-style modernization on families and relationships in a representative rural area… Anyone interested in the modernization of rural areas, in China or elsewhere, should read this book.”
Choice
“[T]he book makes a distinct contribution to ongoing efforts in social science to respect the perspectives of marginal groups and to present the complexities of social structural transformation.”
The China Journal
“Chinese Village Life Today is a concise and persuasive read, and the author effectively conveys his findings from nearly 20 years of fieldwork. Among the book’s many interventions, three innovative aspects of it stand out: first, its analytical shift to the “rural” for studying migration and the world of work; second, its focus on the negotiation of “intimate choices” and how changing economic and political relations shape this process; and third, its longitudinal and multi-sited methodology that offers a template for other scholars researching social change in developing countries.”
Society for the Anthropology of Work
Podcast Interviews
Chinese Village Life Today. An Interview with Gonçalo D. Santos
New Books Network, New Books in Chinese Studies
English
China Rural: Tradições, Tecnocracia e Etnografia Longitudinal (com Gonçalo D. Santos)
Universo Generalista
Portuguese
