EACS-2016. Book of Abstracts

Section 15 21st Biennial Conference of the European Association for Chinese Studies 185 flicts, and it remains a puzzle why collective protests occur in some Chinese villages but not in others even when the cultural, demographical, and socioeconomic conditions are extremely similar. Drawing upon statistical analysis on national survey data and intensive qualitative fieldwork, this paper reveals that the likelihood of collective protest in a Chinese village to a large extent depends on the relations between local cadres and the civic and religious organisations in their jurisdictions. It further demonstrates that social organisations with certain varieties of social capital are more likely than others to enhance the quality of governance in Chinese villages. More precisely, three varieties of social capital can be identified in social organisations in contemporary rural China: ‘bonding’ (social ties between members of a network who are similar in a socio-demographic sense), ‘bridging’ (social ties between members of a network who do not necessarily share similar social identity), and ‘linking’ (social ties between people who are interacting across power or authority gradients in society); and only organisations that simultaneously possess these three varieties of social capital are able to effectively mediate conflicts and prevent collective contention. That is to say, among the various social organisations in rural China, only those simultaneously accepted by local cadres and ordinary villages as credibly channels for signals and information are capable and effective in the quality of governance in Chinese. Turini Cristiana (University of Macerata) Cosmo, Society and the Body: the Experience of Illness and Healing among the Naxi People of Yunnan Province Key words: Naxi people, body, illness, healing, divination Cultural background has an important influence on many aspects of people’s lives, including: their beliefs, their behavior, perceptions, emotions, concepts of space and time and attitudes to illness, pain and other forms of misfortune. Therefore, body and culture are not really separated from one another and, to a larger extent, individuals embody the culture that they live in. So, sensations, perceptions, feelings and other bodily experiences are all culturally patterned and, as a consequence, the “production of illness” too can be seen in terms of a culturally patterned event, besides being a social process, having its roots in the culture to which it belongs. On these premises, I will point out the links existing between cosmos, society and the body in the experiences of illness and healing among the Naxi people. I will show how illness does not only reside in the physical body, but also in the interactions between physical body and lived body, and in the interpretive activities of the ill person and of the ritual specialist appointed to heal as well as of other persons belonging to the Naxi social world and taking part to a particular illness reality. This process turns Naxi illness into a complex social and cosmological event. I will then consider the relations binding the Naxi body to the metaphysical world and how they can cause a pathological condition. Questions of aetiology will then be answered in social and cosmological terms. I will also point out the importance of divination as the only means by which the causes of illness may be discovered and how in the context of divination and the new understandings it creates, the body becomes a defile through which signification passes, an opening onto agents of life which, though unseen, have been exerting a powerful effect on events. Wallenböck Ute (University of Vienna) “Guerrilla-fieldwork” among Mongols at the Sino-Tibetan Borderland Key words: ethnography, guerrilla-fieldwork, Mongols, Qinghai, research ethic Ethnographic fieldwork has been fraught with difficulty since its beginning. My paper exemplifies these difficulties by discussing actual research carried out on the collective identity of Mongols in Amdo Tibet. My field of research is located in the Southern parts of contemporary Qinghai Province. The experiences for my paper focus on the years (intermittently from 1995 until 2009) when I studied, lived and worked in that