Private Life under Socialism: Love, Intimacy, and Family Change in a Chinese Village, 1949-1999For seven years in the 1970s, the author lived in a village in northeast China as an ordinary farmer. In 1989, he returned to the village as an anthropologist to begin the unparalleled span of eleven years fieldwork that has resulted in this book a comprehensive, vivid, and nuanced account of family change and the transformation of private life in rural China from 1949 to 1999. The author s focus on the personal and the emotional sets this book apart from most studies of the Chinese family. Yan explores private lives to examine areas of family life that have been largely overlooked, such as emotion, desire, intimacy, privacy, conjugality, and individuality. He concludes that the past five decades have witnessed a dual transformation of private life: the rise of the private family, within which the private lives of individual women and men are thriving. |
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Page xvi
... Premarital Sex in a North China Village , " published in The China Jour- nal , no . 48 ( 2002 ) . Part of Chapter 4 was previously published under the title " The Triumph of Conjugality : Structural Transformation of Family Rela- tions ...
... Premarital Sex in a North China Village , " published in The China Jour- nal , no . 48 ( 2002 ) . Part of Chapter 4 was previously published under the title " The Triumph of Conjugality : Structural Transformation of Family Rela- tions ...
Page 11
... premarital sex , which I learned about through another channel -- the family of the girl's boyfriend THE CHINESE FAMILY 11.
... premarital sex , which I learned about through another channel -- the family of the girl's boyfriend THE CHINESE FAMILY 11.
Page 14
... premarital sex and argue that sexual intimacy contributes to the development of affection- ate love . A close look at the local forms of love expression and the changing discourse about the ideal spouse shows that a romantic revolution ...
... premarital sex and argue that sexual intimacy contributes to the development of affection- ate love . A close look at the local forms of love expression and the changing discourse about the ideal spouse shows that a romantic revolution ...
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Private Life under Socialism: Love, Intimacy, and Family Change in a Chinese ... Yunxiang Yan No preview available - 2003 |
Common terms and phrases
1949 revolution According ancestor worship became bedroom behavior birth control birth planning bride bridewealth Chapter Chinese family Chinese villagers collective period conjugal daugh daughter daughter-in-law decades dowry early economic elderly parents elderly support emotional empty nest engaged family change family division family property father fengliu fertility culture fieldwork filial piety ganzhe gender gifts girl groom's family guanxi heated bed Heilongjiang household chores husband ideal important individual intergenerational interviews kinship lagers land laoshi late Li Yinhe male marriage married sons moral nuclear families old age older villagers one's party secretary peasant percent policies political postcollective premarital sex reform relationship revolution ritual role romantic love rural China second child social spouse selection stem families tion told traditional trend urban village youth Wang wedding wife wives women Xiajia village yinsi young couples young villagers young woman younger youth autonomy yuan
Popular passages
Page 7 - We started from the obvious fact that at all times and in all places a clear, commonsensical distinction has been made between the public — that which is open to the community and subject to the authority of its magistrates — and the private. In other words, a clearly defined realm is set aside for that part of existence for which every language has a word equivalent to "private...
Page 109 - The alteration seems to be in the direction of some type of conjugal family pattern - that is, toward fewer kinship ties with distant relatives and a greater emphasis on the 'nuclear...
Page 8 - ... privatization" of the family. While not inaccurate, this analysis does not go far enough. The modern family, exclusively concerned with private functions, is no longer the same as the family that once performed public functions as well. The change in function has brought about a change in nature. In fact, the family has ceased to be a powerful institution; its privatization has amounted to a deinstitutionalization. Society is moving in the direction of what might be called "informal
Page 137 - For the first half of the twentieth century private life was in most respects subject to communal controls. The wall that was supposed to protect individual privacy was a privilege of the bourgeoisie. There is no more striking illustration of this class difference than social attitudes toward the night of marriage. What could be more private than the wedding night, the wedding chamber, and the wedding bed? Among the bourgeoisie the wedding night venue is a secret as closely guarded as the honeymoon...
Page 247 - ... received. Families carefully keep these gift lists and use them for future reference when reciprocal gifts need to be offered. From a researcher's point of view, a gift list may serve as a repository of data on the changing nature of interpersonal relations and as a social map that vividly displays guanxi networks. In my 1991 fieldwork I collected...
Page 8 - Ultimately [in the eighteenth century] the family became the focus of private life ... It became something it had never been: a refuge, to which people fled in order to escape the scrutiny of outsiders; an emotional center; and a place where, for better or for worse, children were the focus of attention.
Page 44 - ... in direct contradiction to the popular idea that romantic love is essentially limited to or the product of Western culture.
Page 223 - It was not the family which existed in order to support the individual, but rather the individual who existed in order to continue the family
Page 81 - From an outsider's point of view, the social world of the Chinese villager is characterized by an insistent emphasis on work, drudgery, and production. But work is the symbolic medium for the expression of social connection, and work affirms relationship in the most fundamental terms the villagers know.
Page 212 - Chinese women do not choose to limit this burden only because childcare and childbearing are sometimes uncomfortable, painful, and exhausting, and at worst fatal. They do so as well because they have access to a secondary model of kinship relations that is submerged within a more visible kinship ideology. This model, especially clear among petty capitalists, rationalizes childbearing as a measurable contribution made to meet a specific obligation, and also rationalizes its limitation. (Gates 1993:...