Civet Cats, Fried Grasshoppers, and David Beckham's Pajamas: Unruly Bodies after SARS

This article discusses the viscerality of consumption; in particular, consumption-as-eating and consumption-as-spending as a set of heterogeneous, contestatory discourses and practices of identity production and subject formation. To do so, I bring together two intersecting events: the Chinese government's ban on wild animal markets during the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) outbreak, and Chinese and European media frenzy over the visit to China by the Spanish football club Real Madrid in the wake of the epidemic. In discussing these events, I pay specific attention to unruly bodies-both human and nonhuman-as consumables and those who consume them. In examining translocal encounters of these unruly bodies, I suggest that, in post-SARS China, discourses and practices of consumption produce emergent socialities that at once refigure racialized Orientalist tropes and conjure up discrepant neoliberal imaginaries of lifestyle and consumer choice

Hegemony and the Improvisation of Resistance: Political Culture and Popular Practice in Contemporary China (Folk Religion, Peasants, Ideology).

In post-Liberation China, the Party has long taken an active role in the creation of a "socialist spiritual civilization" for which it provides moral and cultural leadership as well as political leadership. In so doing, the state draws heavily on history as one of the most important sources of its authority. The re-creation of the bitter past through local history writing demonstrates the superiority of the Party's leadership in the present. The socialist state, in its claim to a moral hegemony, also claims for itself the popular voice. This means that by default all other expressions of popular sentiment are defined as fraudulent. However the structure of power inherent in any state organization almost guarantees the expression of popular sentiment outside an officially defined order of things. In China these sentiments may be expressed in non-linguistic ways by taking such forms as: commodities in the marketplace, folk ritual, and the exchange of gifts. In texts that the state produces to comment on what it considers to be problems in the spiritual realm, it is just these non-linguistic expresssions of popular sentiment which provide the targets for state concern. The state imposes its own language on these expressive domains to restructure the meanings embodied within them. Folk ritual is therefore redefined as "feudal superstition," the gift is redefined as material waste (or as "economic crime"), and certain commodities are defined as unhealthy ("spiritual pollution"). The presence of fraudulent practices is attributed by the state to economic backwardness, ignorance and the persistence of a "small producer's mentality" in the Chinese countryside. By representing them in this way, to what extent does the state further empower these areas of social life to become expressive of oppositional sentiments? Do they in fact provide the elements used to create powerful "cross-representations" of the state which are made by ordinary people in the form of folk emperors and bogus officials? These areas of popular practice provide an illuminating perspective on the nature of state hegemony in contemporary Chinese society.Ph.D.Cultural anthropologyUniversity of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/160470/1/8512351.pd