Family Strategies: Fluidities of Gender,Community and Mobility in Rural West China

摘要

This article queries the current mobility of China's rural population by inverting the usual urban perspective and looking at this mobility through exploring the lives of those who do not move. It departs from a micro-analysis of who remains in the countryside in three west China agricultural communities between 2003 and 2005 and links this with an exploration of emergent structural features of rural communities as they are remade in the early 21st century in the wake of the abolition of agricultural taxes and levies. The ethnographic approach adopted highlights the agency, choices and practices of local people in charting their courses in a rural social world being drained of people. It proposes the utility for analysis of family strategies, identifying a repertoire of resourceful and diverse practices through which people strive to recreate and repopulate their social worlds. The argument links the study of historical directions in polity and economy with local and gendered practices in everyday life.