Cooperation in Chinese Communities: Morality and Practice

Charles Stafford, Ellen R. Judd and Eona Bell (eds.)

Bloomsbury Academic, LSE Monographs on Social Anthropology 2018.

China has moved in recent decades from a marginal and even esoteric place in anthropological thought to being recognized as deeply engaged with the dynamics shaping life in the twenty-first century.  This is ethnographically evident in processes of social transformation and mobility that affect  kin-based and wider social ties as people remake these in their everyday practices of cooperation.  The deterritorialization of kinship has posed especially interesting practical problems as families are dispersed and people find creative ways to create translocal and non-kin (but often kin-like) ties that engender new forms of relatedness and cooperation.   An  important corollary has been moral commentary about kin and about wider ties of local, national and dispersed community that is both culturally specific and inseparable from  international questioning.  The result is a provocative set of variations on the central human problem of striving to live in a world together.

https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/cooperation-in-chinese-communities-9781350077218/

Table of contents

Contributor biographies
Preface: The Morality of Chinese Cooperation, Charles Stafford (London School
of Economics, UK), Ellen Judd (University of Manitoba, Canada) and Eona Bell (Cambridge University, UK)
1. Kin and non-kin cooperation in China, Charles (London School
of Economics, UK)
2. Playing ball: Cooperation and competition in two Chinese primary schools, Anni Kajanus (University of Helsinki, Finland)
3. The role of xiao in moral reputation management and cooperation in urban China and
Taiwan, Désirée Remmert (London School of Economics, UK)
4. Harmony ideology in Chinese families: Cooperating despite unfairness, Magdalena Wong (Chinese
University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong)
5. Cooperation in funerals in a patrilineal village in Jinmen (Taiwan), Hsiao-Chiao Chiu (University of Edinburgh, UK)
6. Memory leaks: Local histories of cooperation as a solution to water-related cooperation
Problems, Andrea E. Pia (London School of Economics, UK)
7. Care as bureaucratic lubricant: The role of female care workers in an old people’s home in rural
China, Cecilia Liu (Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Germany)
8. Reputation, morality and power in an emigrant community ( qiaoxiang ) in Guangdong
Province, Meixuan Chen (University of Bristol, UK)
9. Jiaoqing ethics and the sustainability of non-kin cooperation, Di Wu (Sun Yat-Sen University,
China and SOAS, UK)
10. Power, gender and ‘network-based cooperation’: A study of migrant workers in Shenzhen, I-Chieh Fang (NationalTsing Hua University, Taiwan)
11. Challenges to ethnic cooperation among Hong Kong Chinese in Scotland, Eona Bell (Cambridge University, UK)
12. Problems in the new cooperative movement: A window onto changing cooperation mechanisms, Mark Stanford (University of Oxford, UK)
13. Cooperation, competition and care: Notes from China’s New Rural Cooperative Medical
System, Ellen R. Judd (University of Manitoba, Canada)
Notes
References
Index