
Chinese Village Life Today
Building Families in an Age of Transition
- 320 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
About this book
An intimate look at twenty-first century households in rural China 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.
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Information
Table of contents
- Cover
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Dedication
- Contents
- Foreword by Charles Stafford
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Language and Orthography
- Naming Conventions
- Introduction: Building Families in an Age of Transition
- Chapter 1. Harmony Cave Families: Transition to the Twenty-First Century
- Chapter 2. Love and Marriage: The Challenge of Scientific Birth Planning
- Chapter 3. Women and Childbirth: The Ambiguities of High-Tech Medicalization
- Chapter 4. Grandparents and Labor Migration: Technologies of Multiple Mothering
- Chapter 5. Flush Toilets: The Politics of Material Civilization
- Chapter 6. Popular Religion: Technologies of Ethical Imagination
- Glossary of Chinese Terms
- Notes
- References
- Index