Abstract
This study reports a field study of movie theaters in a large Chinese city. Interpreting the evidence on the changing physical attributes of theater auditoriums and theater managers’ discursive practices in making these changes, we show that movie theaters express a society’s common-sense ideas of time. These ideas are the collective beliefs and hermeneutic readings of the historic moment of China’s modernization which movie-going activities in part constitute. Emerging from our analysis are three theses that constitute the cultural dynamics of China’s modernization process: the universal flow of time providing inspiration for change and routes to search for the criteria of modernity, shifting definitions of public and private time as an indication of the changing relationship between the state and society, and the sociogeographic specificity of time as a framework for social actors’ strategic reasoning.
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