In this Book
- Gifts, Favors, and Banquets: The Art of Social Relationships in China
- Book
- 2016
- Published by: Cornell University Press
- Series: The Wilder House Series in Politics, History and Culture
An elaborate and pervasive set of practices, called guanxi, underlies everyday social relationships in contemporary China. Obtaining and changing job assignments, buying certain foods and consumer items, getting into good hospitals, buying train tickets, obtaining housing, even doing business—all such tasks call for the skillful and strategic giving of gifts and cultivating of obligation, indebtedness, and reciprocity.
Mayfair Mei-hui Yang's close scrutiny of this phenomenon serves as a window to view facets of a much broader and more complex cultural, historical, and political formation. Using rich and varied ethnographic examples of guanxi stemming from her fieldwork in China in the 1980s and 1990s, the author shows how this "gift economy" operates in the larger context of the socialist state redistributive economy.
An elaborate and pervasive set of practices, called guanxi, underlies everyday social relationships in contemporary China. Obtaining and changing job assignments, buying certain foods and consumer items, getting into good hospitals, buying train tickets, obtaining housing, even doing business—all such tasks call for the skillful and strategic giving of gifts and cultivating of obligation, indebtedness, and reciprocity. Mayfair Mei-hui Yang's close scrutiny of this phenomenon serves as a window to view facets of a much broader and more complex cultural, historical, and political formation. Using rich and varied ethnographic examples of guanxi stemming from her fieldwork in China in the 1980s and 1990s, the author shows how this "gift economy" operates in the larger context of the socialist state redistributive economy.
Table of Contents
- Acknowledgments
- pp. vii-viii
- 1. Guanxi Dialects and Vocabulary
- pp. 49-74
- 2. The Scope and Use-Contexts of Guanxi
- pp. 75-108
- Part II: Theoretical Formulations
- pp. 173-176
- 5. The Political Economy of Gift Relations
- pp. 177-208
- Conclusion: Back to the Source
- pp. 312-322
- Chinese and Japanese Bibliography
- pp. 334-340
- English Bibliography
- pp. 341-360