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ABSTRACT
Examining the rise of children’s birthday celebrations in rural China, this article asks what is at stake in these festivities. As kin, friends, and neighbours rally around offspring, birthday parties focus on what children are and will become. Through ritual acts relatives express ties to scarce offspring as kin, often in competition with one another and the values they seek children to attain. Rural citizens thereby negotiate and contest new forms of social exclusion linked to population policies and economic transformation in the Chinese countryside. By imbuing birthday parties with ritual forms, these celebrations challenge theoretical assumptions about the secularisation of kinship under capitalism and the nuclearisation of the family through state bureaucracy.
Acknowledgements
My deepest gratitude goes to the families in Sweeping Cliff who generously welcomed me into their homes and lives. I would also like to thank both the editors and anonymous reviewers at Ethnos for their insightful comments. Friends and colleagues offered lively comments and debates on earlier or partial drafts of this paper in workshops and seminars, including at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, the re:work research centre on Work and Human Life Cycle in Global History in Berlin, the Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Hamburg, and the ArgO-EMR Group at the University of Oxford. I am particularly grateful to exchanges with Elisabeth Hsu, Robert Parkin, Chris Hann, Janet Carsten, Julia Pauli, Michelle Engeler, and Dimitra Kofti in developing these ideas.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Correction Statement
This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Notes
1 To engage with entangled notions of personhood and kinship, this article builds on anthropological analyses of the processual constitution of personhood over time through engagement with others, particularly kin, whose personhood becomes enmeshed, and even distributed through and with these others (Carsten Citation2000; Strathern Citation2005). Therefore, persons cannot be reduced to bounded and autonomous individuals by excluding the manifold relations that make up a person’s entangled life worlds (Strathern Citation1988). Moreover, kinship and reproduction are not restricted here to the biological, or even genetic, constitution of relatives, but include the many persons, processes, practices, and acts contribute to making a particular person over their life course (Carsten Citation2000). For a fuller description of how personhood and kinship interact in Sweeping Cliff and rural China, see Bruckermann Citation2017.
2 The official nation-wide loosening of the Family Planning Policy since 2015 has led to the establishment of an effective Two-Child-Policy across the country. However, from the early 1980s the policy was frequently more lax than a narrow focus on Han ethnic citizens living in urban centres would suggest. Local implementation of the policy for rural residents and ethnic minority citizens frequently allowed for more than a single child within the designated quota system. Children born in excess of their local government quota could sometimes be regularized and registered after the payment of punitive fines, but lasting stigma or indirect punishment, such as termination of employment or forced sterilization procedures, could also ensue. For a more detailed account of the local specificities of the family planning policy in Sweeping Cliff, see Bruckermann Citation2017.
3 This state limitation on who can claim children as offspring runs counter to the long-standing male-dominated patrilineage organizations of China. In Late Imperial China (up to 1911) patrilineages gave senior men from dominant lineage branches authority to dispose over a wide web of junior and female kin, while wives and concubines could even be excluded from claiming ties to the offspring they gave birth to. Republican forces (1912–1949) and Maoist revolutionary fervour (1949–1976) explicitly advocated overthrowing adherence to these forms of reverence towards senior kin and ancestral forces. However, the following four decades of Market Reforms (since 1978) saw reproductive restrictions further undermining assumptions about the authority of senior generations of kin through the devaluation of their labour.
4 All place names and personal names have been changed to preserve anonymity.
5 The couplet rests on the homophonic local dialect phrase of ‘fish and shrimp’ (Jin zü and ha, Putonghua yu and xia), two species considered bound to kinship by sharing a pond. The expression pairing fish and shrimp, unlike the otherwise similar English idiom that ‘birds of a feather flock together’, additionally carries valences of poverty, lack, and precarity of reproduction under harsh conditions by alluding to the aquatic life of small, helpless creatures surviving in a crowded pool through mutual care.
6 There is no translation offered for this term, because the local dialect term of Kuolian had no external referential meaning beyond the bread nor a character-based transcription for standard Mandarin.