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Cosmologies of Credit: Transnational Mobility and the Politics of Destination in China

by Julie Y. Chu

Duke University Press, 2010
eISBN: 978-0-8223-9316-0 | Paper: 978-0-8223-4806-1 | Cloth: 978-0-8223-4792-7
Library of Congress Classification JV8709.F8C48 2010
Dewey Decimal Classification 304.80951245

ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE

ABOUT THIS BOOK

Year after year a woman sits in her bare living quarters with her bags packed. She is waiting for a phone call from her snakehead, or human smuggler. That longed-for call will send her out her door, away from Fuzhou, China, on a perilous, illicit journey to the United States. Nothing diffuses the promise of an overseas destiny: neither the ever-increasing smuggling fee for successful travel nor her knowledge of the deadly risks in transit and the exploitative labor conditions abroad. The sense of imminent departure enchants her every move and overshadows the banalities of her present life. In this engrossing ethnographic account of how the Fuzhounese translate their desires for mobility into projects worth pursuing, Julie Y. Chu focuses on Fuzhounese efforts to recast their social horizons beyond the limitations of “peasant life” in China. Transcending utilitarian questions of risks and rewards, she considers the overflow of aspirations in the Fuzhounese pursuit of transnational destinations. Chu attends not just to the migration of bodies, but also to flows of shipping containers, planes, luggage, immigration papers, money, food, prayers, and gods. By analyzing the intersections and disjunctures of these various flows, she explains how mobility operates as a sign embodied through everyday encounters and in the transactions of persons and things.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Julie Y. Chu is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago.

REVIEWS

“Cosmologies of Credit is a rich ethnography of migration that describes departures rather than arrivals, debts to gods that loom as large as debts to humans, and the lived experience of mobility without movement. Julie Y. Chu provides wonderfully subtle renderings of passionate and painful longings not to be left behind. One of the most astute and beautifully written ethnographies about China, Cosmologies of Credit is a pleasure to read.”—Lisa Rofel, author of Desiring China: Experiments in Neoliberalism, Sexuality, and Public Culture

“In this vivid account of Fuzhounese villagers’ strenuous efforts to realize their own cosmopolitan mobility as undocumented, smuggled persons, Julie Y. Chu connects architecture, spirit money, the politics of destination, and the cosmology of value. As she convincingly argues, mobility is the modern feature of modernity, and the real is always in motion.”—Tani Barlow, Rice University

“. . . [A] remarkably rich, sensitive ethnographic account. . . . Chu convincingly challenges conventional conceptions of place and displacement in the social analysis of migration and diaspora.”

-- Jing Shao Asian Anthropology

“Julie Chu's ambitious ethnography provides a captivating description of contemporary Chinese people's desire for mobility. . . . Cosmologies of Credit is daunting in scope and provides numerous insights for scholars interested in contemporary Chinese migration practice. . . . It is a major contribution to the fields both of migration and of China studies, and demonstrates the continued relevance of anthropological approaches to China's place in a globalized era.”

-- Jamie Coates The China Journal

“The contradiction between the desired modern persona and the classically superstitious practices that are deployed to attain it has been noted by other researchers, but its ethnographic elaboration is one of the most interesting aspects of Chu’s book. Cosmologies of Credit enriches our understanding of the meshing between private and state desires of modernity that are so characteristic of today’s China.”

-- Nyíri Pál The China Quarterly

“This is a fine example of how a modern ethnography can be written in a way that informs about people’s lives without attempting to describe everything in a research site. It is also an example of how to write a transnational ethnography that transcends geographical boundaries. Unlike most anthropological works on China or on Chinese overseas which treat each as rather separate, this work links the study of China with the study of Chinese overseas very well.”

-- Tan CheeBeng Journal of Asian Studies

“The study reveals a great deal about the conditions, motivations, and perceptions of the residents of the village with respect to their identities, opportunities, and how movement (especially economic and transnational) fits into their worlds…an important book for social scientists who study immigration, human smuggling, transnational movement, or nonurban society in contemporary China.”

-- Brian J. Nichols Religious Studies Review

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Renqing

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