Producing 'guanxi': Relationships, subjects and subcultures in a rural Chinese village

This dissertation ethnographically examines the gift giving, banqueting, kinship and ritual practices of northern Chinese villagers in Fengjia, Shandong Province. It views these practices from two angles: first, as ways of constructing personal relationships (guanxi); second, as means of shaping and asserting "peasant" subcultures. In the former focus it concentrates primarily on problems of translating culture, on discerning and interpreting the differing cultural assumptions underlying the production of guanxi in rural Shandong and the managing of personal relationships in the west. One of the basic findings is that guanxi unite material obligation and feelings of friendship in a manner not usually found in western personal relationships. In the latter focus the dissertation concentrates on historical problems of state/village interaction--primarily those of the (re)invention of ritual and tradition in the context of the evolving policy and propaganda of Chinese Communist Party led state. This focus relies on historical as well as ethnographic research. The dissertation as a whole pays particular attention to the construction of subjects--both in practices of guanxi production and in peasant subculture. The Foucaultian notion of "subjectification" is a central theoretical construct.