Introduction: crises of care in China today

The introduction presents an overview of crises of care in China today, specifically as they affect the fields of kinship, health, and government. To study care ethnographically, we distinguish between the attentive and active dimensions of care: what people care about, and how they care for others. Acts of care always relate to larger concerns and general values, but they scale up in different ways. The imbalances that emerge are central to the politics of care which our contributors describe. Care as attentive co-growth engages different values, remakes inequality, and nourishes political life. The contributors use the same framework of attention, action, and politics to investigate crucial issues in Chinese society, including family, health, environment, ritual and animals. In all these fields care provides a privileged vantage point to understand social and moral change in China today

Pioneers of the plantation economy: militarism, dispossession, and the limits of growth in the Wa State of Myanmar

The characteristic mobility of highland populations in Southeast Asia relied to a large extent on their particular adaption to an ecological environment: swidden cultivation of tubers on mountain slopes. This ecology corresponded to cosmologies in which potency was limitless, or at least had no fixed and delimited precinct (as did the rice paddies and Buddhist realms in the valleys). Military state building, modern transport, and new crops and agricultural technologies have effectively ended swidden cultivation. In this article, I follow the pioneers of the plantation economy in the Wa State of Myanmar, who dispossess local populations of their land and employ them as plantation labour. The limits of growth and potency they encounter are (a) in the natural environment and (b) in the resistance of local populations. Yet, even though there are such limits, the potency to which these pioneers aspire is still limitless. It is however channelled through a new economy of life, epitomised in the plantation, nourished in excessive feasting, and maintained by the kinship dynamics of capture and care

Student Space Control

The role of the city changed within the knowledge economy. Knowledge has become the most important resource of urban prosperity and universities are considered the hope of city development (Van Winden 2009). Previous research has elaborated various dimensions in which universities interact with their home cities (or regions). They refer to economic impacts (e.g. Behr 2004; Florida 2006; Van Winden 2007; Gabe 2012), differ between forms of the spatial and structural integration of the university into the area (e.g. Larkham 2000; Kunzmann 2004; Gerhard 2012) or focus on social impacts of universities in the urban environment (e.g. Chatterton 1999; Sage et al. 2011; Smith 2004; Smith/Hubbard 2014; Gerhard, Hoelscher & Wilson 2017). All of these rely on a specific concept of space. However, they are lacking the neutral consideration of a fundamental factor of city development in university towns: students as urban agents (Russo/Tatjer 2007). Students constitute a considerable part of the population in university cities. As such, they need to play a key role in the analysis of the urban space. Drawing on a systematic literature review (Machi & McEvoy 2016), it is shown within this presentation that whenever students are subject to urban studies, either their role is conceptualized with a negative connotation (‘Studentification’: most important Smith 2004, 2008) or mainly depicted as leading to urban devaluation. As a counter draft to the prevailing approaches, the concept of ‘Student Urbanity’ (Steinmueller 2015) is introduced as an unbiased approach to the analysis of students as a source of urban processes of change. Using official (urban) statistics as well as observations and maps, the presentation highlights the results of a comparative case study, which exploratively tested this model in the cities of Heidelberg (Germany) and Montpellier (France) (Steinmüller 2015). Starting with the identification of distribution patterns of students’ residences, urban areas with a significantly high share of them are analysed with regard to the following research questions: - Which (social-)structural and spatial characteristics can be observed in these areas? - How do the students shape the urban space and infrastructure within the detected areas? - Which tendencies of revaluation respectively devaluation emerge from this influence? The presentation makes an empirical case for ‘Student Urbanity’ showing the relations between urban space and university with regard to students as agents of the development. It concludes with the discussion of this new student role as potential sources of reurbanisation as well as urban inequalities

Research ethics and everyday ethics: doing fieldwork with observers of their own ‘culture’ in rural Hubei

One of the things that constantly surprised me during my fieldwork was the extent to which local inhabitants observed and described their own ‘culture’. The forms that self-observations and self-descriptions take depend very much on the audience. In this article, I describe my encounters with such self-observations and my learning about the differences between outsider representations and insider understandings. Learning to recognise these differences was crucial for the ‘ethics’ of my research in terms of my interactions with both local officials and villagers, writes Hans Steinmüller

Para-nationalism: sovereignty and authenticity in the Wa State of Myanmar

If nationalism is defined as a claim to sovereignty based on authenticity, para-nationalism is nationalism in the state of war: urgent, yet ultimately futile. Modern warfare makes it particularly urgent for historical latecomers to national unity to claim their national sovereignty. Those claims, however, sometimes have to be postponed for the very same reason of military pragmatism. The double bind of nationalism at war is illustrated with the case study of the Wa State of Myanmar: Persistent military threat imparts great urgency to the promotion of authentic culture, the purification of a shared language and the rationalisation of violence. Yet at certain moments and places, the same objectives are put aside, in favour of working with what is at hand. Rather than a semiotic circle, it is suggested that the entanglement of para-nationalism and war is primarily a pragmatic bond, which is accessible to ethnographic analysis