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

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

Father Mao and the country-family: mixed emotions for fathers, officials, and leaders in China

What does it mean when Mao Zedong is called ‘father Mao’ and when ordinary people in central China put a poster of Mao in the place of the ancestors and the emperor? This article is about ordinary affection for the Chinese state, and explores changing ideas of the leader as a father and the country as a family. The first part deals with the historical transformations of such family metaphors from the late Qing dynasty to the present, describing the vernacularization and sentimentalization of the ‘Confucian order of the father/son’ in 20th century China. Against this historical background and based on fieldwork material from central China, the second part deals with the mixed emotions people have for fathers at home, local officials and national leaders now