Lammer, Christof. Performing State Boundaries: Food Networks, Democratic Bureaucracy and China. New York: Berghahn Books. 2024.
Polarizing images of authoritarian, socialist or culturalist otherness compromise analyses of the Chinese state. Still, such images produce effects beyond academia when they inform performances of the boundaries between state and non-state. This book shows how performative boundary work leads to contrasting judgements that decide about support and access to resources. In an ecological village in Sichuan, citizen participation in food networks and bureaucracy signaled Western liberalism, Maoism or traditional rural culture for different audiences. Attention to the multiplicity of performed state boundaries helps China studies and political anthropology to understand such diverging classifications – and how they sometimes co-exist without causing tensions.
Reviewers’ statements
“This book is of interest not just to scholars studying China but more generally to social scientists, particularly to social anthropologists to whom it advocates the infusion of the political to the study of kinship. It is well organised and suitable for courses on the local state in the PRC and the anthropology of the state.”
Stephan Feuchtwang, London School of Economics and Political Science
“An excellent example of an ethnographically grounded theoretical work. It offers a useful and dense overview of the anthropology of the state, advances cutting-edge questions and counterbalances the Orientalist othering of China.”
Klāvs Sedlenieks, Rīga Stradiņš University
Author bio
Christof Lammer is a social anthropologist based at the Department of Society, Knowledge and Politics, University of Klagenfurt, and a fellow at Humboldt University of Berlin’s Centre for Advanced Studies inherit – heritage in transformation. He has co-edited special issues on ‘Measuring Kinship: Gradual Belonging and Thresholds of Exclusion’ (2021, Social Analysis) and ‘Infrastructures of Value: New and Historical Materialities in Agriculture’ (2024, Ethnos). He is also a co-organizer of the Scientific Network ‘Anthropology and China(s)’ (2021–2025).
Follow this link to visit the announcement’s website: https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/LammerPerforming