Consumers and Individuals in China: Standing Out, Fitting In (Chinese Worlds)

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Product Description

Breaking new ground in the study of Chinese urban society, this book applies critical discourse analysis to ethnographic data gathered in Anshan, a third-tier city and market in northeast China. The book confronts the – still widespread – notion that Chinese consumers are not "real" individuals, and in doing so represents an ambitious attempt to give a new twist to the structure versus agency debates in social theory. To this end, Michael B. Griffiths shows how claims to virtues such as authenticity, knowledge, civility, sociable character, moral proprietary and self-cultivation emerge from and give shape to social interaction. Data material for this path-breaking analysis is drawn from informants as diverse as consumerist youths, dissident intellectuals, enterprising farmers, retired Party cadres, the rural migrant staff of an inner-city restaurant, the urban families dependent on a machine-repair workshop, and a range of white-collar professionals.

Consumers and Individuals in China: Standing out, fitting in, will appeal to sociologists, anthropologists, and cultural studies scholars, China Studies generalists, and professionals working at the intersection of culture and business in China. The vivid descriptions of living and doing fieldwork in China also mean that those travelling there will find the book stimulating and useful</P></p>

Consumers and Individuals in China: Standing Out, Fitting In (Chinese Worlds) Review

Anyone who reads Michael Griffith's Consumers and Individuals in China expecting to find the rule-bound marching morons of Confucian or Maoist stereotypes or the soulless search for niche markets presented "scientifically" is in for a big surprise. The book begins with a profound critique of both these intellectual postures and goes on to develop an argument rooted in post-structuralist social theory that is ethnographically focused on culture as a fluid and changing environment within which individuals must struggle to position themselves. The method is daring, yet simple. Talk to Chinese individuals with whose lives you are familiar and take seriously what they say as they tease out the ambiguities, conflicts and contradictions with which they wrestle. Do not explain away what they say. Do not swallow unthinkingly the stereotypes that the language they use may suggest. Listen and think about what you are hearing and what it might mean to someone who is living those lives, rural, urban, immigrant, young, old, entrepreneur, punk-styled beautician, nervous intellectual, retired factory worker....whatever the situation in which you find them. Listen and reflect on what they say in light of critical theory that suggests new questions unasked by other Sinologists and treat what these Chinese individuals say as part of the conversation instead of just grist for the theorist's mill.

The result is not at times an easy book to read, but it is an important one and well worth the effort it takes to join these conversations.

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