American Ethnologist
Volume 30, issue 2
Foreword
Virginia R. Dominguez
Unplanned Persons and Gendered
Children
Planned births,
unplanned persons: "Population" in the making of Chinese modernity
Susan
Greenhalgh
In this article I suggest that "population" operates as a capacious
domain of modern power, with its own imaginaries, discourses, bureaucratic apparatuses,
and social effects. Taking China, home to the world's largest population, as
my ethnographic case, I examine the role of "birth planning," China's
distinctive Marxist-Leninist-Maoist approach to population control, in the construction
of "Chinese socialist modernity." I trace the historical, political,
and bureaucratic process by which the state's planned birth project, designed
to create a modern, planned population, produced not only a large group of planned
persons but also a huge outcast group of unplanned, "black" persons
who, as legal nonpersons, exist on the margins of society, lacking citizenship
rights and state benefits. With its gargantuan population and fearsome birth
planning program, China offers striking evidence of the social power of governmental
projects on population control--to create new classifications of social life,
new types of personhood, and new forms of social and political exclusion.
[population, modernity, personhood, China]
Children and the gendered politics of globalization: In remembrance
of Sharon Stevens
Liisa Malkki and Emily Martin
Written to honour the memory of Sharon Stephens as an exceptional anthropologist,
this article focusses on her groundbreaking work of critically theorizing children
and childhoods in relation to the politics of late capitalism and structures
of modernity. Stephens' research into the contested category of childhood is
here linked specifically to the location and uses of the figure of "the
child" in the gendered politics of globalization.
[children, childhood, globalization, gender, late capitalism, modernity,
Cold War", national security" discourses]
read more »
