A “Feel-Good” Future: Hopes and Class Identities Among Martial Arts Students in China

Abstract

This article examines how a group of martial arts students in China make sense of their futures and how their hopes toward a “feel-good” future reveal and affect their perceived class identities. Twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork was conducted in Dengfeng, a county-level city in central China. Dengfeng was home to 48 registered martial arts schools and more than 70,000 full-time students in 2012. By uncovering the hopes, aspirations, and perceived class identities of people in martial arts schools, this article argues that the process of class-making for these martial arts students results in constantly reorienting their hopes. These hopes often reflect social comparisons with familiar others like parents, friends, and acquaintances.

Keywords

class identity martial arts education hope China

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Anagnost

(2008). From “class” to “social strata”: Grasping the social totality in reform-era China. Third World Quarterly, 29, 497-519.

Bottero

(2012). Who do you think they were? How family historians make sense of social position and inequality in the past. The British Journal of Sociology, 63, 54-74.

Bourdieu

(1984). Distinction: A social critique of the judgment of taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Bourdieu

(2000). Pascalian meditations. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Bourdieu

Wacquant

(2013). Symbolic capital and social classes. Journal of Classical Sociology, 13, 292-302.

Cliff

(2015). Post-socialist aspirations in a Neo-Danwei. The China Journal, 73, 132-157.

Dong

(2016). Being tough and belonging: Technologies of masculinity among martial arts students in China. The Asia & Pacific Journal of Anthropology, 17(1), 34-49.

Dong

(2017). Home(lessness) in urbanizing China: Invisible violence and left-behind children in martial arts schools. Education and Urban Society, 49(3), 251-270.

Hanser

(2008). Service encounters: Class, gender, and the market for social distinction in urban China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

10.

Hsu

(2007). Creating market socialism: How ordinary people are shaping class and status in China. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

11.

Irwin

(2015). Class and comparison: Subjective social location and lay experiences of constraint and mobility. The British Journal of Sociology, 66, 259-281. doi:10.1111/1468-4446.12121

12.

Irwin

Elley

(2013). Parents’ hopes and expectations for their children’s future occupations. Sociological Review, 61, 111-130.

13.

Kipnis

(2016). From village to city: Social transformation in a Chinese county seat. Berkeley: University of California Press.

14.

Mains

(2011). Hope is cut: Youth, unemployment, and the future in urban Ethiopia. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.

15.

Markus

Nurius

(1986). Possible selves. American Psychologist, 41, 954-969.

16.

Miyazaki

(2004). The method of hope: Anthropology, philosophy, and Fijian knowledge. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

17.

Miyazaki

(2006). Economy of dreams: Hope in global capitalism and its critiques. Cultural Anthropology, 21, 147-172.

18.

Ortner

(2006). Anthropology and social theory: Culture, power, and the acting subject. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

19.

Pine

(2014). Migration as hope: Space, time, and imagining the future. Current Anthropology, 55, S95-S104.

20.

Tomba

(2014). The government next door: Neighborhood politics in urban China. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

21.

Weber

(1978). Economy and society. Berkeley: University of California Press. (Original work published 1924)

22.

Woronov

(2011). Learning to serve: Urban youth, vocational schools and new class formations in China. The China Journal, 66, 77-99.

23.

Yang

(2008). A preliminary study on the use of mobile phones amongst migrant workers in Beijing. Knowledge, Technology, & Policy, 21, 65-72.