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"The People's Commune Is Good": Precarious Labor, Migrant Masculinity, And Post-Socialist Nostalgia In Contemporary China, Xia Zhang
Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations
Post-socialist China is characterized by the loss of social and economic safety nets for workers, particularly the most marginalized. Scholars and others have assumed that informal laborers lack the associational power needed to mitigate the precarity of their lives. Drawing on ethnographic data collected between 2004 and 2016 in Chongqing, this article examines the ways in which precariously employed rural migrant men create their own safety nets by drawing on their past experiences of agricultural collectivization in the socialist era to form cooperative associations. It further explores how these men leverage cultural resources from the socialist period to retain male …
Intensified Foraging And The Roots Of Farming In China, Shengqian Chen, Pei-Lin Yu
Intensified Foraging And The Roots Of Farming In China, Shengqian Chen, Pei-Lin Yu
Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations
In an accompanying paper (Journal of Anthropological Research 73(2):149–80, 2017), the authors assess current archaeological and paleobiological evidence for the early Neolithic of China. Emerging trends in archaeological data indicate that early agriculture developed variably: hunting remained important on the Loess Plateau, and aquatic-based foraging and protodomestication augmented cereal agriculture in South China. In North China and the Yangtze Basin, semisedentism and seasonal foraging persisted alongside early Neolithic culture traits such as organized villages, large storage structures, ceramic vessels, and polished stone tool assemblages. In this paper, we seek to explain incipient agriculture as a predictable, system-level cultural response …
Early “Neolithics” Of China: Variation And Evolutionary Implications, Shengqian Chen, Pei-Lin Yu
Early “Neolithics” Of China: Variation And Evolutionary Implications, Shengqian Chen, Pei-Lin Yu
Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations
The growth and significance of scientific research into the origins of agriculture in China calls for fresh examination at scales large enough to facilitate explanation of cultural evolutionary processes. The Paleolithic to Neolithic transition (PNT) is not yet well-understood because most archaeological research on early agriculture cites data from the more conspicuous and common early Neolithic sites. In this, the first of two papers, we synthesize a broad range of early Neolithic archaeological data, including diagnostic artifacts, settlement patterns, site structure, and biological remains, to consider agriculture as a system-level adaptive phenomenon. Although farming by this period was already well-established …