Chu Julie Y. Chu

Cosmologies of Credit (eBook, PDF)

Transnational Mobility and the Politics of Destination in China

• Format: PDF

Produktbeschreibung

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.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Seitenzahl: 360
• Erscheinungstermin: 6. Dezember 2010
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9780822393160
• Artikelnr.: 54818842

Autorenporträt

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

Inhaltsangabe

Acknowledgments ix
Notes on Orthography and Names xiii
Introduction 1
Part I. Edgy Dispositions 23
1. To Be Emplaced: Fuzhounese Migration and the Geography of Desire 31
2. Stepping Out: Contesting the Moral Career from Peasant to Overseas
Chinese 59
Part II. Exits and Entrances 101
3. Snakeheads and Paper Trails: The Making of Exits 107
4. Bad Subjects: Human Smuggling, Legality, and the Problem of Entrance 141
Part III. Debts and Diversions 165
5. For Use in Heaven or Hell: The Circulation of the U.S. Dollar among
Gods, Ghosts, and Ancestors 171
6. Partings and Returns: Gender, Kinship, and the Mediation of Renqing 217
Conclusion: When Fortune Flows 257
Notes 269
Bibliography 295
Index 321