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Private Life under Socialism Yunxiang Yan

Private Life under Socialism By Yunxiang Yan

Private Life under Socialism by Yunxiang Yan

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Summary

For seven years in the 1970s, the author lived in a village in northeast China as a farmer. In 1989 he returned as an anthropologist to begin the span of 11 years' fieldwork that has resulted in this work - an account of family change and the transformation of private life in rural China.

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Private Life under Socialism Summary

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

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.

Private Life under Socialism Reviews

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. -- China Quarterly
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. -- Deborah Davis * Yale University *
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. -- Population and Development Review
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. -- H.T. Wong * Eastern Washington University *
...a thought provoking book... -- American Historical Review
. . . Yan contributes tremendously to the field of China studies by empirically countering a number of its dominant and discriminatory assumptions. -- Canadian Journal of History
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. -- Journal of Asian Studies
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. -- Matthew Z. Noellert * Anthropological Quarterly *
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. -- William Jankowiak * University of Nevada, Las Vegas *
This ethnographic study should be in every academic library. * Library Journal *

About Yunxiang Yan

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).

Additional information

CIN0804744564VG
9780804744560
0804744564
Private Life under Socialism: Love, Intimacy, and Family Change in a Chinese Village, 1949-1999 by Yunxiang Yan
Yunxiang Yan
Used - Very Good
Paperback
Stanford University Press
20030312
320
N/A
Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
This is a used book - there is no escaping the fact it has been read by someone else and it will show signs of wear and previous use. Overall we expect it to be in very good condition, but if you are not entirely satisfied please get in touch with us

Customer Reviews - Private Life under Socialism