Emptiness and Fullness : : Ethnographies of Lack and Desire in Contemporary China / / ed. by Mikkel Bunkenborg, Susanne Bregnbæk.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Berghahn Books Complete eBook-Package 2017
• MitwirkendeR: Bregnbæk, Susanne,; Bunkenborg, Mikkel,; Carrico, Kevin,; Hansen, Anders Sybrandt,; Howlett, Zachary M.,; Møller, Henrik Kloppenborg,; Ulfstjerne, Michael Alexander,
• HerausgeberIn: Bregnbæk, Susanne,; Bunkenborg, Mikkel,
• Place / Publishing House: New York ;, Oxford : : Berghahn Books, , [2017]; ©2017
• Year of Publication: 2017
• Language: English
• Series: Studies in Social Analysis ; 2
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (154 p.)

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

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Illustrations -- Introduction -- Chapter 1 China’s Examination Fever and the Fabrication of Fairness ‘My Generation Was Raised on Poisoned Milk’ -- Chapter 2 Guanhua! Beijing Students, Authoritative Discourse and the Ritual Production of Political Compliance -- Chapter 3 Interior Space s of Hope: Inner Selves, Intersubjectivity and Agency among Chinese Christians in Beijing -- Chapter 4 The Tower and The Tower: Excess and Vacancy in China’s Ghost Cities -- Chapter 5 The Manchu in the Mirror: The Emptiness of Identity and the Fullness of Conspiracy Theory -- Chapter 6 Empty Diseases and Horror Vacui in Rural Hebei -- Chapter 7 The Potentials of Feicui: Indeterminacy and Determination in Human-Jade Interactions in South-west China -- Index