Christof Lammer’s fine-grained ethnography describes the complexity of political processes in an eco-village in Sichuan. The usual pigeonholing of the Chinese state does not work here. An exciting read for anyone interested in how images of authoritarian, socialist and cultural otherness shape social policy and the transition to ecological agriculture.

Lammer, Christof. 2024. Performing State Boundaries: Food Networks, Democratic Bureaucracy and China. New York: Berghahn Books.

For his research, social anthropologist Christof Lammer lived for over a year in a village that was part of an alternative food network in Sichuan Province. The village had founded a cooperative to convert to ecological agriculture in the 2010s. This transition was initiated by Dong Jie. He was simultaneously valued as part of global civil society, esteemed part of rural community, and praised as a good state agronomist. This allowed him to secure the support of actors with different political ideas: organized urban middle-class consumers, activist scholars and the local government. Based on this observation, Christof develops an innovative approach to the anthropology of the state, which understands the performative boundary work between state, civil society, and family in its multiplicity and materiality.

One day during his stay in the eco-village, all existing minimum livelihood allowances in the county were suddenly canceled and citizens had to reapply for these benefits. This “standardization” was justified not only by “too much” kinship – “corruption” – but also by “too little” kinship and the supposed loss of traditional Chinese values ​​– “the lack of household responsibility”. While this standardization affected the lives of the former recipients, it offered Christof the rare opportunity to observe the democratic administration of the reapplication process. His ethnography shows how performative boundary work between state and kinship could turn similar practices into individualism, traditional familism or corruption and thus decided about access to the social benefits.

“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

 

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Thanks to the generous support of the University of Klagenfurt and its Department of Society, Knowledge and Politics, the entire book is available online (open access):

https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/LammerPerforming

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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).