Distancing the regulating state: corruption, transparency and the puzzle of personal relatedness in a food network in Sichuan

Author(s)

Christof Lammer

Abstract

Blurred boundaries between public and private have long been presented as signs of the Chinese state’s “otherness”. This othering is prone to continue in discussions of food safety regulation in China. In the dominant Western model of the independent regulator, personal relations are framed as corruption and presented as a threat to institutions. Anthropological writing on post-socialism offers the reverse argument, that personalistic ties such as guanxi compensate for institutional deficiencies. Both interpretations are limited because of their reliance on economic theory rather than on ethnographic theorising. During fieldwork in a food network of peasant cooperatives and consumer associations in Sichuan, I observed that images of personal relations are nurturing both urban middle class consumers’ distrust in the state’s regulatory capacity regarding organic food and their hope for transparency in a civic alternative. To understand this ambivalent interpretations of personal relatedness as either inducing corruption or enabling transparency, I adopt a relational approach to the state. The article shows how positive evaluations of personal relatedness emerge as state officials and other citizens in the food network distance “the state”. This analytical focus on boundary work promises a way out of the dead-end of presupposed otherness in debates on regulation in China.

Organisation(s)

Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology

Journal

Urban Anthropology and Studies of Cultural Systems and World Economic Development

Volume

47

ISSN

0894-6019

Publication date

2018

Peer reviewed

Yes

Austrian Fields of Science 2012

504009 Ethnology

Keywords

Portal url

https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/70311248-b44f-4bf4-b97c-d97076a2a178