Gifts, Favors, and Banquets

The Art of Social Relationships in China

Nonfiction, History, Asian, China, Social & Cultural Studies, Social Science, Anthropology
Cover of the book Gifts, Favors, and Banquets by Mayfair Mei-Hui Yang, Cornell University Press
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Author: Mayfair Mei-Hui Yang ISBN: 9781501713040
Publisher: Cornell University Press Publication: December 1, 2016
Imprint: Cornell University Press Language: English
Author: Mayfair Mei-Hui Yang
ISBN: 9781501713040
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Publication: December 1, 2016
Imprint: Cornell University Press
Language: English

An elaborate and pervasive set of practices, called guanxi, underlies everyday social relationships in contemporary China. Obtaining and changing job assignments, buying certain foods and consumer items, getting into good hospitals, buying train tickets, obtaining housing, even doing business—all such tasks call for the skillful and strategic giving of gifts and cultivating of obligation, indebtedness, and reciprocity.

Mayfair Mei-hui Yang's close scrutiny of this phenomenon serves as a window to view facets of a much broader and more complex cultural, historical, and political formation. Using rich and varied ethnographic examples of guanxi stemming from her fieldwork in China in the 1980s and 1990s, the author shows how this "gift economy" operates in the larger context of the socialist state redistributive economy.

View on Amazon View on AbeBooks View on Kobo View on B.Depository View on eBay View on Walmart

An elaborate and pervasive set of practices, called guanxi, underlies everyday social relationships in contemporary China. Obtaining and changing job assignments, buying certain foods and consumer items, getting into good hospitals, buying train tickets, obtaining housing, even doing business—all such tasks call for the skillful and strategic giving of gifts and cultivating of obligation, indebtedness, and reciprocity.

Mayfair Mei-hui Yang's close scrutiny of this phenomenon serves as a window to view facets of a much broader and more complex cultural, historical, and political formation. Using rich and varied ethnographic examples of guanxi stemming from her fieldwork in China in the 1980s and 1990s, the author shows how this "gift economy" operates in the larger context of the socialist state redistributive economy.

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