18 research outputs found

    Buddhist Vegetarian Restaurants and the Changing Meanings of Meat in Urban China

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    This article charts the changing meanings of meat in contemporary urban China and explores the role played by Buddhist vegetarian restaurants in shaping these changes. In Kunming, meat has long been a sign of prosperity and status. Its accessibility marked the successes of the economic reforms. Yet Kunmingers were increasingly concerned about excessive meat consumption and about the safety and quality of the meat supply. Buddhist vegetarian restaurants provided spaces where people could share meat-free meals and discuss and develop their concerns about meat-eating. While similar to and influenced by secular, Western vegetarianisms, the central role of Buddhism was reflected in discourses on karmic retribution for taking life and in a non-confrontational approach that sought to accommodate these discourses with the importance of meat in Chinese social life. Finally, the vegetarian restaurants spoke to middle-class projects of self-cultivation, and by doing so potentially challenged associations between meat-eating and social status

    The Moral Registers of Banqueting in Contemporary China

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    Chinese feasting encompasses everything from life-cycle celebrations to the indulgences of corrupt officials. Although woven into the commodity economy, banqueting also creates and solidifies social relationships, providing a space where different moral economies converge. This article explores the moral economies that intersect in Chinese banqueting as well as the differing moral registers people use to understand it. Proper form in banqueting is essential to being a cultured person and all banqueting gathers meaning through analogy to the commensal sharing at the heart of the family and ritual economy. Lavish official banqueting may be condemned in popular and state discourse as corrupt; yet officials may claim banqueting is necessary work that creates social connections which help their localities. Banquet inflation among ordinary people is also subject to contradictory moral evaluations. While the recent crackdown on official corruption stigmatises banquet indulgence, it may reinforce ordinary people’s desire to utilise banquets as one of their only tools to influence those with relatively more power

    Negotiating Rural Land Ownership in Southwest Rural China: State, Village, Family

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    Repertoires of family life and the anchoring of Afghan trading networks in Ukraine

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    This article examines the “repertories” of family life of men of Afghan background in Odessa, Ukraine. It focuses on these men's intimate relationships with “local women” and challenges the notion that such unions merely offer a form of emotional escape for migrants or refugees far from home. Instead, we advance two arguments: first, that Afghan men in Ukraine form part of a complex transnational trading network, rather than a bounded group of refugees or migrants; second, that the cross-community relationships between Afghan men and “local women” play a significant role in the spatial anchoring and commercial fortunes of transnational Afghan traders in Ukraine. In the analysis of our ethnographic data, we consider the importance of the aftermath of the Cold War in shaping the diverse forms of family life within these trading networks
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