This book examines the value of food in rural China through an ethnographic study of a Hakka village in Meixian, a county in northeast Guangdong Province. By examining the role of food in the lives of one community, the book attempts to show how food in rural China is an essential building block of social relations and a source of value both within, but also beyond the market economy. It examines the role food plays in the organization of labor, the recollection and generational transfer of historical and personal memories, systems of exchange and relationships between humans, and between huma ... More

This book examines the value of food in rural China through an ethnographic study of a Hakka village in Meixian, a county in northeast Guangdong Province. By examining the role of food in the lives of one community, the book attempts to show how food in rural China is an essential building block of social relations and a source of value both within, but also beyond the market economy. It examines the role food plays in the organization of labor, the recollection and generational transfer of historical and personal memories, systems of exchange and relationships between humans, and between humans and the cosmos, moral discourses and judgements, and in sociality and emotion. It hopes to show how a focus on food provides a somewhat more complex and nuanced picture of contemporary rural China than accounts which emphasize only the decline of social cohesion, rise of individualism, and the end of all moral economies in the wake of industrialization and the global capitalist market. Rather, a focus on food provides a lens into the complex interplay between the forces of cultural continuity and rupture, ties to the land and the pull of the city, family duties, sociality, and the growth of individualism, and an economy based on money and profit versus older forms of exchange that privilege social obligations.