Claiming Homes: Confronting Domicide in Rural China

By Charlotte Bruckermann

Chinese citizens make themselves at home despite economic transformation, political rupture, and domestic dislocation in the contemporary countryside. By mobilizing labor and kinship to make claims over homes, people, and things, rural residents withstand devaluation and confront dispossession. As a particular configuration of red capitalism and socialist sovereignty takes root, this process challenges the relationship between the politics of place and the location of class in China and beyond.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Release date: Oct 3, 2019
• ISBN: 9781789203585

Charlotte Bruckermann

Charlotte Bruckermann currently works in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen. Her publications include a book co-written with Stephan Feuchtwang The Anthropology of China: China as Ethnographic and Theoretical Critique (2016, Imperial College Press), and various articles and chapters on environment, kinship, housing, care, morality, and ritual.

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CLAIMING HOMES

DISLOCATIONS

General Editors: August Carbonella, Memorial University of Newfoundland, Don Kalb, University of Bergen and Utrecht University, Linda Green, University of Arizona

The immense dislocations and suffering caused by neoliberal globalization, the retreat of the welfare state in the last decades of the twentieth century, and the heightened military imperialism at the turn of the twenty-first century have raised urgent questions about the temporal and spatial dimensions of power. Through stimulating critical perspectives and new and cross-disciplinary frameworks that reflect recent innovations in the social and human sciences, this series provides a forum for politically engaged, ethnographically informed, and theoretically incisive responses.

Recent volumes:

Volume 26

Claiming Homes: Confronting Domicide in Rural China

Charlotte Bruckermann

Volume 25

Democracy Struggles: NGOs and the Politics of Aid in Serbia

Theodora Vetta

Volume 24

Worldwide Mobilizations: Class Struggles and Urban Commoning

Edited by Don Kalb and Massimiliano Mollona

Volume 23

The Revolt of the Provinces: Anti-Gypsyism and Right-Wing Politics in Hungary

Kristóf Szombati

Volume 22

Frontiers of Civil Society: Government and Hegemony in Serbia

Marek Mikuš

Volume 21

The Partial Revolution: Labour, Social Movements and the Invisible Hand of Mao in Western Nepal

Michael Hoffmann

Volume 20

Indigenist Mobilization: Confronting Electoral Communism and Precarious Livelihoods in Post-Reform Kerala

Luisa Steur

Volume 19

Breaking Rocks: Music, Ideology and Economic Collapse, from Paris to Kinshasa

Joe Trapido

Volume 18

The Anthropology of Corporate Social Responsibility

Edited by Catherine Dolan and Dinah Rajak

Volume 17

Enduring Uncertainty: Deportation, Punishment and Everyday Life

Ines Hasselberg

For a full volume listing, please see the series page on our website: https://www.berghahnbooks.com/series/dislocations

CLAIMING HOMES

Confronting Domicide in Rural China

Charlotte Bruckermann

Berghahn Books

First published in 2020 by

Berghahn Books

www.berghahnbooks.com

© 2020 Charlotte Bruckermann

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Bruckermann, Charlotte, 1984- author.

Title: Claiming homes : confronting domicide in rural China / Charlotte

Bruckermann.

Description: First edition. | New York : Berghahn Books, 2020. | Series:

Dislocations; volume 26 | Includes bibliographical references and

index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019029047 (print) | LCCN 2019029048 (ebook) | ISBN

9781789203578 (hardback) | ISBN 9781789203585 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Sociology, Rural--China. | Rural population--China. |

Home--China. | Kinship--China. | Group identity--China. | Social

classes--China. | Rural-urban relations--China.

Classification: LCC HT443.C6 B78 2020 (print) | LCC HT443.C6 (ebook) |

DDC 307.720951--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019029047

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019029048

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-78920-357-8 hardback

ISBN 978-1-78920-358-5 ebook

CONTENTS

List of Figures

Acknowledgments

Notes on Transliteration

Introduction. The Countryside as Home

Part I. History, Politics, Place

Chapter 1.    The Big Village

Chapter 2.    Genealogies Revealed and Concealed

Part II. Gender, Generation, Kinship

Chapter 3.    Reproducing Kin across Generational Divides

Chapter 4.    Gendered Aspirations in Marriage

Part III. Labor, Location, Precarity

Chapter 5.    Fields, Food, and the Market

Chapter 6.    Dangerous Domesticities

Conclusion.  Claims, Belonging, and the Home

Postscript.    Home as Workplace

References

Index

FIGURES

Figure 0.1. Aerial view of Sweeping Cliff.

Figure 0.2. Sweeping Cliff rooftops.

Figure 1.1. Funeral procession on Sweeping Cliff main street.

Figure 2.1. Ancestral tablets with Chairman Mao and the God of Wealth.

Figure 2.2. Ancestral tablet cabinet and family photographs.

Figure 2.3. The autumn harvest in a courtyard home.

Figure 3.1. Frosting play at a birthday.

Figure 3.2. A celebrated singleton baby with his father and his maternal grandfather.

Figure 3.3. Mother and newborn sitting the month (zuo yuezi) on the kang with the infant’s maternal grandmother providing care.

Figure 3.4. A maternal grandmother surrounds her grandson with the kuolian wreath bread.

Figure 3.5. Sheep breads, pork dishes, and a birthday cake.

Figure 3.6. Grandmothers encircling their grandson with the kuolian wreath bread.

Figure 4.1. Ritual reliance on brothers and shovels for the bridal sending-off ceremony.

Figure 4.2. Bride checking her bridewealth before her sending-off ceremony.

Figure 4.3. Bridewealth suitcase including jewelry, cash, and bank card.

Figure 4.4. Bride and groom making joint wishes for their marital future.

Figure 5.1. Harvesting millet together.

Figure 8.1. The new village.

Figure 8.2. The dragon dance, a new tradition for Sweeping Cliff.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

From first venturing on fieldwork to publication, I have been almost a decade in the writing of this book. Through all the twists and turns over these years, I had the very good fortune to encounter a great number of wonderful people who helped me along the way—only some of whom can be mentioned within these few pages, and none of whom can I do justice to with just a few words of thanks.

My deepest gratitude extends to the people of Sweeping Cliff, who generously opened their homes and shared their lives with me. In particular my host family formed a source of comfort, patience, and sustenance throughout my stay and upon my return visits. For their friendship, hospitality, and warmth, I am particularly grateful to Nainai, Sanhua, Erhua, Huanzi, Guowei, Kunjuan, Hanshuai, Yangqiang, and Zhijing. Lu Douheng smoothed the path for this academic exploration and kept the gates of Sweeping Cliff open. Li Hong’s optimism, kindness, and enthusiasm fortified me through rocky beginnings. Sun Liping made vital recommendations and introductions to locate my fieldsite. Teacher Zheng shared his time, knowledge, and wisdom with me time and again. In Beijing, Gao Bingzhong, Weng Naiqun, Lai Delin, and Karin Janz provided me with invaluable academic and personal support to get this research off the ground. To keep the sparkle going, I could not have had better confidants than Judy Bretschneider, Sha Hua, Lan Tu, Lamine Lahouasnia, Lidia Sakarapani, Max Duncan, Mike Nalwalker, and Duncan Innes-Ker.

At the University of Oxford, I owe a great deal to the inspiration of Elisabeth Hsu and to creative discussions and exchanges over the years while she was my doctoral supervisor and beyond. Leading by example, she showed me how to take courage while crossing bridges, both in terms of the practical steps during fieldwork and in taking theoretical leaps in writing between diverse fields of anthropology, from medical to ritual and beyond. Bob Parkin supported me throughout my time in Oxford in everything from navigating bureaucratic hurdles to introducing me to the exciting field of kinship. As a thesis examiner Adam Chau graciously took the time and energy to provide attentive reading, sharp comments, and evocative questions for my viva. By reading, commenting, and encouraging me on my work, Anna Lora-Wainwright, Inge Daniels, Eileen Walsh, and Maria Jaschok shaped this project at various stages. I would never have reached the finish line without the long walks and even longer talks with Insa Koch, Urvashi Aneja, Ros Holmes, Emilie Lefebvre, and Kate Leadbetter. A great number of friends helped with the final countdown, including Lee Crawfurd, Ike Belcher, Hugh Lazenby, Juri Viehoff, Iza Kavedžija, and (quite literally) Oliver Owen.

Funding for the DPhil research was generously provided by the Economic and Social Research Council, the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, and St Antony’s College. These ideas took further shape during various postdoctoral fellowships in the anthropology department at the London School of Economics (LSE; 2012–2014), the re:work Center for Work and the Lifecycle in Global History at the Humboldt University (2014–2015), the Europainstitut at the University of Basel (2015), the Department for Resilience and Transformation in Eurasia at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology (2016–2018), and the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen.

At the LSE I was immersed in an exciting, encouraging, and collegial atmosphere, and I am grateful to everybody there for helping me work through arguments, ideas, and comments. I would like to express particular thanks to my fellow fellows: Tom Boylston, George St Claire, Jason Hickel, James Johnston, Insa Koch, and Zuzanna Olszewska. I appreciated, and very much enjoyed, teaching together with Stephan Feuchtwang, as well as writing a textbook and discussing different ideas in the following years, as his insightful clarity sharpened my own thinking. I also want to thank colleagues, friends, and altogether great people in the wider London anthropology circles, in particular Catherine Allerton, Rita Astuti, Laura Bear, Lewis Beardmore, Max Bolt, Ana Gutierrez, Tom Grisaffi, Tom Hinrichsen, Yanina Hinrichsen, Deborah James, Jess Jacobson, Anni Kajanus, Hannah Klepeis, Jonah Lipton, Nick Long, Mathijs Pelkmans, Alpa Shah, Charles Stafford, Hans Steinmüller, Alice Tilche, Tan Tongxue, Harry Walker, and Gisa Weszkalnys.

In Berlin I benefited from exchanges with past and present fellows at re:work, delving into historical and sociological comparisons that broadened and enhanced my anthropological approach. I am particularly grateful to Farah Barakat, Heike Drotbohm, Andreas Eckert, Michelle Engeler, Felicitas Hentschke, Jürgen Kocka, Alf Lüdtke, Helga Lüdtke, Julia Pauli, Julia Tischler, and James Williams. Beyond the institute, Julia Zantl, André Thiemann, Michael Hoffmann, Mathijs Pelkmans, and Judith Bovensiepen helped turn this time of work into a pleasure.

At the Max Planck Institute in Halle I benefited from being part of a large and diverse anthropological community, and I particularly enjoyed the cooperation and camaraderie within our financialization group composed of Tristam Barrett, Natalia Buier, Dimitra Kofti, Marek Mikuš, and Hadas Weiss, as well as friendships with Hannah Klepeis, Minh Nguyen, Mareike Pampus, Luca Szücs, Ivan Rajković, and Roberta Zavoretti. For filling my life in Halle with art, music, and delicious food, I am thankful to all my housemates at the Reil 100, and especially Stine Albrecht, Aart van Bezooyen, Marlen Tennigkeit, and Sara Schmitz. It was during these three years in Halle that this manuscript took its final shape and reached a publishable state, and for the time and opportunity to finish writing this book I am grateful to Chris Hann. At the institute Jutta Turner created the crisp map for this book and James Carrier read and improved the book proposal and manuscript plans. For reading, commenting, and suggesting improvements to the entire manuscript, I am very thankful to the two reviewers at Berghahn, one of whom subsequently revealed himself as Andrew Kipnis. Don Kalb as an editor of the Dislocations series and Stephen Campbell on the Frontlines project at the University of Bergen also took the time to read the manuscript in the final stages, offering a number of insightful interventions.

Over the years, from before our first Chinese adventures to today, the friendship of Luke Phillips, Alan Lau, Louisa Gladwin, Alex Guiney, Franziska Ochs, Michał Murawksi and Aaron Klemm provided solid grounding for bold antics. Living, working, and celebrating together at various times in the last decade, Insa Koch, Urvashi Aneja, and Ros Holmes have offered strength, support, and joy. Last, I want to thank my family, in particular my mother, father, brother, sister, and grandmother, for supporting me throughout all my adventures and always welcoming me back home.

Chapter 1 includes excerpts from the 2016 article Trading on Tradition: Tourism, Ritual, and Capitalism in a Chinese Village, published in Modern China 42(2):188–224, doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/0097700415578808 and reproduced courtesy of Sage Publications. Sections of Chapter 2 appeared in the 2017 article The Materiality of the Uncanny: Preserving the Ruins of Revolution in Rural Chinese Homes in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 37(3):446–55, doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201x-4279152 and is reproduced courtesy of Duke University Press. Chapter 3 includes sections from the 2017 article Caring Claims and the Relational Self across Time: Grandmothers Overcoming Reproductive Crises in Rural China in JRAI (Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute) 23(2):356–75, doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.12611, reproduced courtesy of Wiley; 2019 Why Do Grandparents Grumble? Chinese Children’s Birthdays between Kinship, Market, and State, in Ethnos, doi: 10.1080/00141844.2018.1561486, reproduced courtesy of Taylor and Francis; and 2017 Longevity, Labor, and Care between Kin and State in China, in Global Europe—Basel Papers on Europe in a Global Perspective 114:2–23, https://europa.unibas.ch/fileadmin/user_upload/europa/PDFs_Basel_Papers/BS114.pdf, reproduced here courtesy of the Institute for European Global Studies, University of Basel.

An earlier version of Chapter 6 appeared as an article in 2018 as Rumours as Moral Action: Contesting the Local State through Housing in China, in Critique of Anthropology 38(2):188–203, doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X18758875, reproduced courtesy of Sage Publications.

NOTES ON TRANSLITERATION

Although a predominantly Han ethnic province, the linguistic diversity of Shanxi is palpable, and its dialects are not only numerous but also frequently mutually unintelligible. Shanxi dialects, or Jin yu, are enriched by a diverse and ancient vocabulary, a shifting Sandhi tonal system, and glottal stops that punctuate guttural flows of melodic rises and falls of the human voice.

Sinitic languages are usually divided into six or seven groups of Mandarin, Wu, Xiang, Yue, Min, and Gan, with Kejia being either separate or part of the Gan group. The renowned linguist and dialectologist Li Rong (1987) revised this classification with three additional groupings, including a separate classification of the Jin dialect found in Shanxi and Inner Mongolia due to its retention of the entering tone (rusheng). The rusheng does not refer to a tone per se, but to a syllable that ends abruptly in a sharp consonant or a voiceless glottal stop made by suddenly cutting off the air in the vocal tract.

I have transliterated from Chinese characters using the Pinyin system of Romanization for standard Mandarin (Putonghua). Where crucial terms or phrases were transcribed from local Jin, the spelling reflects the original sound as closely as possible following the Pinyin system. The difference is denoted through transcription of the local dialect term or phrase, followed by the Putonghua term.

Map of Shanxi. Map created by Jutta Turner.

INTRODUCTION

The Countryside as Home

Uneven Earthiness

Laolei and I were thrown together in a van bumping along a winding road westward through the Shanxi mountain range in the summer of 2009.¹ Passengers hopped on and off the van shouldering unwieldy sacks of red sorghum and balancing juicy green watermelons, as our vehicle crisscrossed the rural gorges of north China’s Loess Plateau baking under the sweltering sun. Laolei, now in his seventies, came of age under Maoism and proudly identified as a peasant (nongmin) commanding authority over all aspects of rural life. Hearing I was headed for a historical trading village on the Yellow River (famed for its merchant cave dwellings), Laolei reacted with disbelief. The merchants and financiers who had dominated the Shanxi economy in the late Imperial Era were regarded as morally dubious for extorting profit from the rightful hands of citizens and the state, maligned by both Confucian and Maoist thought. The lines on Laolei’s tanned face deepened as he squinted at me with quizzical eyes, before exclaiming with exasperation, "Why do you want to go there? It’s so earthy [tu]!"

As he and I gazed out of the dusty windowpane at the agricultural terraces carved into the golden ravines, Laolei turned his narrative of the land into one of pride, as he explained that the passing fields were all manmade. He then launched into a reverie of Maoist nostalgia about how the chairman organized the farmers to build high-quality terraces throughout the area to increase agricultural output. Most famously, the town of Dazhai became a model for all the good communists of the land, inspiring campaign slogans that Laolei enthusiastically recited: For agriculture, learn from Dazhai! Move the mountains to make the fields! Change the sky to alter the land! I asked him if he thought the craggy Shanxi mountainside was beautiful, to which he replied, Beautiful or not, it’s home.

Figure 0.1. Aerial view of Sweeping Cliff. Image data: Google Earth, DigitalGlobe 2019.

Laolei then reminisced about the peasantry working together to make the land efficient through pooling their collective labor in brigades, before lamenting that many families nowadays did not even farm the small plots of land that the village committees allocated to their households. As he saw it, today the land is going to waste, because young people don’t want to go to the fields; they want to go to the office and do business. Laolei’s accusation was that contemporary rural youth resisted working the land, instead following aspirations to enter nonagricultural sectors of the economy. He prided himself on living a frugal life as a peasant (nongmin), unlike those merchants of old and the businesspeople of today, who turned away from labor in the fields in search of more lucrative trades and professions.

Fangdi, a Shanxi tour guide in the village of Sweeping Cliff (Figure 0.1), where I ended up doing fieldwork, was just this type of young peasant. He was employed with other young rural workers in a newly established tourism development company attempting to break into the emerging service economy in the area. On one occasion we were sitting in their office, where the tour guides waited for their turn in the roster to take affluent Chinese visitors through the village’s main attractions, particularly an underground tunnel complex. Squatting on low stools in the back courtyard tourism office located in an old temple complex, we sipped green tea from glass bottles and chatted about everything under the sun that hung low in the gray pollution of a stifling late summer afternoon.

A conversation unfolded about why Shanxi’s earth, composed of ochre loess soil, was called yellow earth (huangtu). Struck by a train of thought, Fangdi boisterously exclaimed: The yellow earth creates the Yellow River, the Yellow River creates the yellow emperor. To prove his point, Fangdi gestured toward his face: Look, even my skin is that color! Everybody in the tour guide office erupted with laughter. Fangdi went on to explain that China’s history was tied to the peasantry’s dependence on the earth (nongmin kaodi). He argued that this ancient situation is changing as peasants progress forward (tuijin) with development (fazhan).

Fangdi commuted from the city center to the countryside on a daily basis. Nonetheless, his affluent family background jarred with his local dialect and down-to-earth demeanor, leading the other tour guides to frequently tease Fangdi for being overtly earthy (tu). Many of the tour guides came from more humble backgrounds than Fangdi but equaled him in educational attainment and even surpassed him in certain aspects of cosmopolitan sophistication. The tour guides often jostled as they compared and competed over who had higher levels of human quality (suzhi). These young people felt like anything but the sellouts of the post-Maoist Era Laolei made them out to be, instead presenting themselves as the ultimate harbingers of a new vanguard of workers leaving the land but not the countryside (litu bu lixiang).

Despite being officially designated a peasant (nongmin) by the state’s household registration system, Fangdi had never worked the land. Instead, he completed a university education before entering the workforce as a rural tour guide, all while living in a luxurious family apartment in the city. His family came from a rural background but had struck wealth (facai) through the expansion of coal mining operations into the area, a process in which his father was involved as a local cadre for a regulatory bureau. This position within the increasingly key sector of the local economy allowed his family to move to the city when Fangdi was in middle school and gain access to prime real estate in the urban valley. Thereby, Fangdi and his family established themselves as part of an emerging cadre capitalist elite of technocratic experts.

These red capitalists emerged at the helm of the state’s agenda of fostering development in the post-Maoist Era of socialism with Chinese characteristics (see Dickson 2003; So 2003; Kong 2010). They often boasted close ties to the communist party and oversaw strategic resources within particular localities, thereby optimally placing themselves to push the nation forward along a teleologically imagined sequence of progress, while simultaneously safeguarding political stability and economic growth. The official restoration of market mechanisms after 1978 had transformed what once was a command-and-control economy, reorienting sectors ranging from agriculture, industry, and commerce to real estate, education, and healthcare. State institutions and corporate developers rallied around new priorities of competition and profit.

While China’s urban and coastal regions developed rapidly alongside these market transformations, interior provinces like Shanxi struggled to match their economic growth. Simultaneously, across China inequalities between urban cosmopolitan centers and the peripheral countryside became entrenched. Reflecting these disparities, rural residents of China’s interior appear as a monolithic surplus population, tucked away in the hinterlands to serve as a reservoir pool of labor fueling the growth of China’s export-oriented manufacturing zones. I argue that this is not the case: there are deep schisms between what it means to be a peasant within the partial, uneven, and unequal trajectories of development in Shanxi.

Peasants Out of Place

At first glance, the nostalgic Maoist farmer and the red capitalist tour guide appear to have little in common beyond identifying as peasants at home in Shanxi.² However, they share an ambivalent relationship to the earth, both referring to locations and people as earthy with derogatory connotations. This deserves a short explanation. The Chinese character for earth, or tu, at its most literal refers to the land and soil. In a more metaphorical way, tu can also refer to something being indigenous, local, and native, to being of the earth so to speak. An extension of this tie between rootedness and the earth can plunge into a deprecating domain of tu as being too territorialized, too local, and too rural, to the point of being crude or rough. Within Fangdi and Laolei’s description of the countryside a tension runs between the earth as a substance from which life flows and the earth’s association with agricultural work that holds people to a localized, grounded, and at times harsh existence. But what of the people associated with the land?

China has, of course, come a long way from Fei Xiaotong’s (1992 [1948]: 27) famous dictum: Chinese society is fundamentally rural. I say it is fundamentally rural because its foundation is rural. … Country people cannot do without the soil because their very livelihood is based upon it. Instead, the peasant as disappearing in the face of modernity or as the persistent obstacle to development has taken over from the peasant as the bedrock of Confucian order and the vanguard of Maoist progress. Are we simply moving from Laolei’s memories of the peasant as a revolutionary figure and hero of transformation toward Fangdi’s assessment of the peasant as a historical relic and source of embarrassment that can be, at best, a source of self-satirizing jokes?

In the cities, urbanites and rural migrants alike portray the countryside as inert, meaningless, and boring (meijin, meiyisi; Yan H. 2003), populated with people left behind (luohou) by development (Xiang 2007) and lacking the human quality (suzhi cha) found in cosmopolitan centers (Anagnost 1997; Greenhalgh 2010). Parallel to these devaluations of the countryside, rural citizens increasingly sustain livelihoods by integrating into urban labor markets as they migrate, remit wages, or commute to find waged employment (Zavoretti 2017; Murphy 2002; Carrillo 2011). These developments raise critical questions about the commodification of rural labor in the interest of capital accumulation, especially through relations of dependence on and exploitation within cities. Yet, research into contemporary rural conditions shows that the countryside and its residents are far from a homogenous and passive population awaiting deliverance from cosmopolitan capitalist development.

Not all peasants pack up and move to urban centers. Rural citizens remaining in the countryside establish new rural cooperatives (Hale 2013; Yan and Chen 2013; Lammer 2012), turn to organic farming (Klein 2009), improve local health services (Lai 2016), and challenge pollution levels (Lora-Wainwright 2013). They revive religious and ritual practices that strengthen the rural peasantry as an imagined community (Kipnis 1997) and an agrarian public sphere (Chau 2006b). They also move within rural areas, often for marriage and employment, sustaining lifelong relationships across different regions and localities outside urban centers (Gaetano 2015; Judd 2009). They overturn paradigms of the rural as representing a more authentic, traditional, or moral Chineseness by partaking in, and complaining of, rising individualism, competition, and even outright immorality in their midst (Liu 2002; Yan Y. 2003; Tan 2016). Some actively subvert stereotypical contrasts between modernity and ruralism by satirizing these representations (Steinmüller 2013), while others profit from the romantic appeal of the countryside by selling rural experiences to urban tourists hosted in family guesthouses (Park 2008) and ethnic minority villages (Chio 2011). In short, citizens, cadres, and corporations develop rural industries and offer services in the countryside to supplement agricultural livelihoods, thereby realizing state policies to construct a new socialist countryside (jianshe shehuizhuyi xin nongcun) in complex, and sometimes contradictory, ways. In what sense, then, are these peasants out of place in the contemporary moment?

The persistence of peasant status no longer tethered to the land reveals the uneasy integration of agricultural labor into contemporary capitalism, where generating surplus from farming often necessitates significant state subsidies and governmental support. In situations where supplementary financial inputs bolstering capital accumulation for large-scale cultivators are not forthcoming, agriculture predominantly underscores rural livelihood strategies of subsistence supplemented with other sources of income. The growing importance of services and finance, but also subsistence activities, shifts the bases of reproduction beyond the framework of industrial capitalism and calls for consideration of where and how to locate theories of class in the contemporary moment (Friedman 2015). These transformations also raise questions about what we are witnessing: is this the end of the peasantry thrown under the wheels of developmentalist paradigms during the onward march of capitalism or is there rather a propitious reorientation of peasant identities afoot in China?

The Location of Class and the Politics of Place

In order to make sense of the peasantry’s positioning in terms of locality, two contending perspectives in anthropology, one of location and the other of dislocation, are worth articulating. Taking conceptions of locality as not simply given but created through the interaction between human activity and historical processes, James Weiner (2002: 21–22) posits a gulf between anthropological accounts of human relations to place. At one end is a focus on how people mediate attachment to particular places through dimensions of intimacy, knowledge, familiarity, history, and interpersonality associated with long-standing co-constitution of persons and localities. At the other end of the spectrum, there is a second perspective that highlights the transience, the nomadism, the rootlessness, the migratory, the diasporic, the out-of-placedness assumed to be characteristic of contemporary individuals and societies. Yet, the personal, spatial, economic, and political contradictions between location and dislocation cannot be easily resolved, as location frequently disappears from view under processes of dislocation, only to resurface through repressive and even violent exclusions.

Approaches to location and dislocation must not merely be mapped spatially, but temporally, as the constitution of location is assumed to be long term, while experiences of dislocation imply temporal discontinuity, even rupture. By focusing exclusively on the first dimension of location, ethnographic accounts may refuse the contemporary coexistence of the peasantry in the present, in line with a pseudoevolutionary narrative that problematically implies a denial of coevalness (Fabian 1983). By contrast, ethnographers who eclipse location in favor of dislocation may miss the long-term connections and forms of belonging that bind humans together as they pursue intertwined lives across massive spatial, personal, political, and temporal upheaval. Of course, these forms of belonging, especially when projected into the past, are always present articulations that entail evocations of memory, imagination, and even invention (Hobsbawm 1983). To bring location and dislocation together, I trace the labor of homemaking in forging belonging through kinship, community, and citizenship alongside the inequalities and exclusions associated with its broader political identifications.

Within economic relations, claims of belonging also