Member’s Publication: Christof Lammer
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.… Read more ⤻
« Dans la pensée chinoise, la musique est une partie du monde, sinon le monde lui-même en ses manifestations sonores. Œuvre humaine, elle constitue l’essence de la culture, au même titre que l’écriture ou la peinture, mais elle est avant cela l’expression de la nature, voire du 道 dao qui génère les êtres et leur confère leurs normes de fonctionnement cyclique » (préface de Rémi Mathieu). L’ouvrage est ainsi une approche par la voie musicale d’un univers qui s’avère être, à considérer les fondements esthétiques chinois, un véritable entrelacs des arts. Il est aussi fondé sur le constat que la poésie chinoise – à la fois un langage artistique et un langage sur l’art – en révèle des aspects essentiels à une compréhension fine de la pensée musicale et du geste artistique. Dès lors, un tiers de poèmes, un tiers d’illustrations et un tiers de texte théorique et technique, trame tissée d’explicitations directes et brodée d’�!… 
Volume 52, edited by Thomas Fröhlich and Brigit Knüsel Adamec, will be a special volume devoted to Chinese Reflections on the Exile Experience after 1949. China’s 20th century was a century marked by exile. The multifarious experience of exile is arguably one of the salient features of a distinction, as historical periods, between the 19th and 20th century in China.
“Passion, Love, and Qing examines the vitality of Peony Pavilion, the most famous drama in Ming China (1368-1644), through four essays (by Isabella Falaschi, Paolo Santangelo, Tian Yuan Tan, and Rossella Ferrari) and an extensive Glossary of specific terms and expressions related to the representation of emotions and states of mind. It explores the evolution and permanence of the universal message about passion or emotions contained in the language of the play. Written in the late Ming, Peony Pavilion embodies the new trends in the ‘cult of passions’ and new sensibility of the times. It is also a rich intertext of love that both inherits the legacy of earlier literary traditions and influences later amatory literature and theatrical performances.”
