Home>Course>[CHES5106] Selected Themes on Chinese Anthropology: Family, Marriage and Love: Exploring Intimate Relationships in Contemporary China>CHES5106

This course introduces anthropological perspectives on a range of intimate relationships in contemporary Chinese society. It seeks to denaturalize notions such as family, marriage, and love through contextualization—putting them back in the historical, political, and socio-cultural context in which they are embedded. The questions that will be raised in class include: What factors shape the economic and social formations of intimate relationships in contemporary China? What does it mean to say that romantic love is an ideology? How do Chinese people “do” family today? How have family structures, courtship patterns, and gender relations been changing across different regions and groups in China? And what new ethical configurations and forms of inequality are emerging in the process? Are intimate relationships formed in the virtual world any less authentic than those formed in the real world?

The course approaches various kinds of intimate relationships through an anthropological lens, which means that we will explore people’s intimate life experiences via ethnography. Based on a series of captivating readings, video clips, discussions, and other class activities, this course invites students to pay attention to the interconnectedness between the “private” and the “public”—the everyday practices and the economic and socio-political processes. Moreover, this course aims to show how to conduct ethnographic fieldwork and how to use the data collected during fieldwork for analyzing intimate relationships in Chinese society.

1. An Anthropological Approach to Intimate Relationships in Contemporary China
2. Marriage, Family, and Intimate Lives in the Past: Why Does it Matter?
3. What is Love?: A Brief Genealogy
4. Learning Ethnographic Methods for Studying Everyday Intimate Experiences
5. Cultural Scripts of Intimacy: Continuities and Changes
6. The Politics of Intimacy: Struggles and Strategies
7. What about Money?: The Economic Aspect of Marriage and Family
8. Ambiguous Parenthood
9. Recalibrating Old Age and Filial Piety
10. Doing Family with “Things”: Materiality and The Everyday
11. Individual Consultation
12. Divergent Paths: Beyond Normative Family, Marriage and Intimacy I
13. Divergent Paths: Normative Family, Marriage and Intimacy II