Technology of Self, Technology of Power. Volunteering as Encounter in Guangzhou, China
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors explore the growing popularity of volunteering in China and delineate several factors that play into the phenomenon, including students' desire to break out of strict routines, to engage in meaningful activities, to meet people, and to contribute to China's development.
Abstract: In this article, I explore the growing popularity of volunteering in China. I delineate several factors that play into the phenomenon, including students' desire to break out of strict routines, to engage in meaningful activities, to meet people, and to contribute to China's development. Linking these issues to the socio-political, economic, and ideological transformations in China, I show that we cannot meaningfully distinguish between altruistic and self-interested motivations to volunteer. For the students volunteering is a means to transform themselves into modern, entrepreneurial, and responsible selves, necessary to meet the challenges of urban life in China today. Yet, volunteering, encouraged and framed by the government, is also a ‘technology of power’, a means to nurture self-reliant and socially responsible individuals. I show that volunteerism is not simply the reflection of a new ‘governmentality’ but an encounter in which the very relationship between state and society is constantly negotiated.
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TL;DR: The authors explored why China's university students volunteer and found that university students are a key source of volunteers, and their volunteering reasons are an academic concern, adopting a push-pull perspective.
Abstract: University students are a key source of volunteers, and their volunteering reasons are an academic concern. Adopting a push-pull perspective, this study explores why China’s university students par...
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TL;DR: In this article , the authors define the concept of "weaponized volunteering" and analyze its importance for understanding the relations between contemporary trends of moralization and militarization or securitization.
Abstract: This introductory chapter to the monograph issue Weaponized Volunteering explicates and situates the theoretical and conceptual problems the collection addresses. It defines the concept of ‘weaponized volunteering’ and analyzes its importance for understanding the relations between contemporary trends of moralization and militarization or securitization. It does so by providing a brief genealogy of the concept of ‘volunteering’ and the rising public interest in it since the 1990s, with the upsurge of neoliberal transformations and a post-political public sphere. The introduction then continues to review changing ideas in the literature concerning civil–military relationships and also concerning the entanglement of what is considered civil and what falls under non-military ‘security’ domains. It then connects both themes to explain the value of the concept of ‘weaponized volunteering’. Finally, the introduction explores how the various articles in this monograph issue contribute to understanding how moralization and militarization, civic volunteerism, and securitization are increasingly entangled, and reinforce each other.
TL;DR: In this article , the authors investigate how a personal sense of complicity actually surfaces within the market-mediated volunteer experience, and how the ensuing predicament can be tackled, both from the perspective of the critical academic and of the citizen on the ground.
Abstract: ABSTRACT The idea that anyone, with the right critical knowledge and a certain amount of spare time and resources, could become a globally responsible citizen has been skeptically questioned at least since the time of Rousseau. But, during the last two decades, the specific concern that has troubled critical qualitative researchers has been the possible complicity of the active citizen with a neoliberal regime of governmentality, a regime that often uses the injunction to volunteer as a political tactic of responsibilization. The article seeks to address this latent concern through the study of a particularly marketized act of global citizenship: the immersive experience of volunteer travel. Through an innovative Foucauldian analysis and original qualitative method, designed to excavate deeply seated skeptical insights among returned volunteers in Australia, this study elucidates, first, how a personal sense of complicity actually surfaces within the market-mediated volunteer experience, and, second, how the ensuing predicament can be tackled, both from the perspective of the critical academic and of the citizen on the ground.
TL;DR: Wang et al. as mentioned in this paper argued that the emergence of grassroots philanthropy is also a response to people's changing valuation of work in a time of economic restructuring, especially among people who find their labor at risk of becoming surplus.
Abstract: In recent decades China has seen a rise in grassroots “philanthropy” (gongyi), or charity and volunteerism that is not directed by the state. Much of the discussion on this phenomenon suggests that it is a response to a perceived “moral crisis.” But the emergence of grassroots philanthropy is also—and perhaps more centrally—a response to people’s changing valuation of work in a time of economic restructuring, especially among people who find their labor at risk of becoming surplus. This development profoundly challenges their sense of self-worth. As a result, many ordinary people—primarily men with a relatively low social standing—are engaging in philanthropy as a form of “work,” even though this work is frequently in tension with their familial obligations. In doing so, they cocreate alternative social arenas in which the value of their work may be realized. Nonetheless, the question whether doing philanthropy is proper work remains open, ambiguous, and subject to continual negotiation. [grassroots philanthropy, volunteerism, work, value, ethics, China] I t was 4 p.m. and Chen Yuming, a thin man in his 30s, had already spent several hours working alone, sorting donated secondhand clothing in a charity store called Garment Love.1 Yuming had managed this store for over two years. It gave away donated clothing for free to local migrant workers and delivered the rest to Shanxi, Yunnan, and Tibet—“to the poor in remote mountain areas,” as Yuming put it. Garment Love was the first charity store in Haicheng County, located in the greater Wenzhou municipality on China’s southeast coast. The store was fully operated by volunteers, as were most philanthropic organizations in town. At the same time, Yuming was busy with many other philanthropic projects, including a countywide volunteer search-andrescue team that he founded and managed. Every day he donated one yuan (US$0.15) to another charity group, and he participated in two other organizations that made household visits to poor children and elders, offering aid and social support where needed. Although Yuming did not receive money for work of this kind, he did not call himself a “volunteer” (zhiyuanzhe or yigong). He used a fancier title, “grassroots philanthropist” (caogen gongyi ren), which is what many other managers, founders, and supporters of philanthropic organizations in China call themselves. In addition to this very “proper-sounding” yet unpaid work, Yuming took on many other roles. Since age 16, his main source of income had been working as a professional Daoist ritual specialist, sometimes assembling his own team of ritual specialists and working on others’ commissions. As a member of the county’s Daoism Association, he had established a nationwide Daoist orchestra and had organized many events promoting local Daoist culture. He had tried out various forms of wage labor for short periods of time, and for a year he had been involved in the trade of illicit tobacco from the Sino-Burma border, in southwest China. When his wife worked at a local household factory, he sometimes helped out with her piecework at home. AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 0, No. 0, pp. 1–13, ISSN 0094-0496, online ISSN 1548-1425. © 2022 The Authors. American Ethnologist published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of American Anthropological Association All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/amet.13103 This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons AttributionNonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made. 151425, 0, D ow nladed from https://anthrce.onlinelibrary.w il.com /doi/.1111/am et3103 by T st, W ley O nline L irary on [27//2022]. ee he T rm s nd C onitions (https:linelibrary.w il.com /erm s-andnditions) on W ley O nline L irary or rles of use; O A aricles re goerned by he apicable C retive C om m ns L icnse American Ethnologist Volume 0 Number 0 September 2022 Yuming was also the father of a six-year-old daughter, and his wife was pregnant with their second child. Considering these multiple and shifting roles, the following typical sociological categories seem insufficient to characterize Yuming: volunteer, ritual specialist, businessperson, petty capitalist, wage worker. He and his fellow grassroots philanthropists often invoke the vernacular term ordinary person (putong laobaixing) to distinguish themselves from members of the government and the elite. The term grassroots (caogen) denotes their relatively lower socioeconomic standing, as opposed to the conventional portrayal of bourgeois philanthropy and philanthropists, who are associated with making big donations.2 Yuming is one of many ordinary people who are caught up in “philanthropy fever” (gongyi re), which has proliferated in China’s towns and cities in the past decade. Diverse forms of charity and volunteerism are being organized by ordinary citizens, and some are increasingly supported— and monitored—by the state. The term gongyi cishan (philanthropy) has reentered the public sphere and infiltrated the daily lives of many ordinary people in towns through TV, online forums, and social media platforms, particularly QQ and WeChat.3 In this article, I have chosen the English term philanthropy to gloss the various concepts and practices seen in the Chinese context that are mainly expressed by the local terms gongyi (common good), cishan (“compassion” or “charity”), and zuohaoshi (doing good deeds).4 Although these words have different meanings and connotations for different people, most ordinary citizens use them interchangeably, and they constitute a wide range of social acts of doing good for others beyond one’s immediate family, including charitable giving, volunteering, and contributing to civic improvement projects for the collective good, such as building hospitals, schools, and roads, and providing environmental protection.5 New to this wave of contemporary Chinese philanthropy is that its local leaders are not elites, religious leaders, or state agents—as would be true in historical or other social contexts—but rather “ordinary people,” that is, people who have limited wealth and power.6 Despite their relatively precarious financial standing, people like Yuming aspire to work for the collective good, beyond their own family. They have committed themselves to establishing social organizations by mobilizing and managing resources for projects with social objectives, primarily for children, elderly and disabled people, and other marginalized groups who are perceived as in a “state of plight” (kunjing). While most of these “grassroots philanthropists” donate a small sum of money from time to time, they emphasize not how much they can donate but how many volunteers and donors they can mobilize to participate in projects for the collective good, promoting philanthropy as a “lifestyle” for people from all socioeconomic strata. I heard repeatedly from these grassroots philanthropists that “they have money [qian], and we have time [xian]. We should collaborate together and get more people to participate in doing philanthropy!” What motivates people of this kind to do “philanthropy,” to help strangers despite their own increasing anxiety about fulfilling family duties, with varying levels of persistence? This article analyzes the emergence of this grassroots philanthropy in contemporary China.7 The analysis draws on my 18 months of fieldwork in Haicheng County from 2015 to 2017, which was supplemented by annual visits in 2018, 2019, and 2020. Why has China seen a rise in philanthropy (including charity and volunteerism)? One popular argument is that people are doing more charity and volunteerism today as a response to China’s perceived “moral crisis” or “moral decline”:8 the growth of apathy toward strangers, illicit businesses that produce fake or toxic food products, and distrust among strangers. Adding to this is the perceived proliferation of “uncivil” individualism (Yan 2009, 289) since the 1980s post-Mao marketization reforms (see also Yan 2021). It is reasoned that because people fear living with risk and lack a moral compass, new forms of political and moral action have arisen that foster changes in state-society relations. Meanwhile, scholars have taken the growing volunteerism and charity as evidence of a new kind of ethics in response to the perceived moral crisis (Fleischer 2011; Ning and Palmer 2020; Yan 2011).9 For instance, Weller et al. (2017, 2) provide rich ethnographic data that link the rise of religious charity in contemporary Chinese societies to a new form of “self” that is anchored to “transnational and cosmopolitan notions of universal goodness.” They insightfully point out that in this contemporary wave of religious charity, the notion of goodness and the practices it comprises are new to China. They term the new contemporary form “industrialized philanthropy,” which is large scale, increasingly rationalized and bureaucratized, and “dis-embedded from local social life and personal social connections” (Weller et al. 2017, 2), exhibiting a “philanthropic turn of religions” (K. Wu 2017). Building on this analysis, my research similarly suggests that seemingly novel kinds of ethics and social organizations are a product of the political and economic moment. But my research departs from Weller et al.’s (2017) emphasis on delocalized “goodness,” suggesting a complex entanglement of moral and extramoral motivations (economic, political, existential) that are intimately embedded in local social and economic life. As Malkki’s (2015) ethnography of Finnish humanitarian aid reminds us, even explicitly “cosmopolitan” and “universal” values and practices such as humanitarianism and humanitarian aid are buttressed by diverse motives particular to local sociality and politics. Moreover, many analysts assume that, because China’s economy continues
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07 Jan 1988
TL;DR: Martin et al. as mentioned in this paper present a transcript of a faculty seminar on "Technologies of the self," originally presented at the University of Vermont in the fall of 1982, where Foucault's project on the self was the logical conclusion to his historical inquiry over twenty-five years into insanity, deviancy, criminality and sexuality.
Abstract: Shortly before his death in 1984, Michel Foucault spoke of an idea for a new book on "technologies of the self." He described it as "composed of different papers about the self..., about the role of reading and writing in constituting the self... and so on." The book Foucault envisioned was based on a faculty seminar on "Technologies of the Self," originally presented at the University of Vermont in the fall of 1982. This volume is a partial record of that seminar. In many ways, Foucault's project on the self was the logical conclusion to his historical inquiry over twenty-five years into insanity, deviancy, criminality, and sexuality. Because Foucault died before he completed the revisions of his seminar presentations, this volume includes a careful transcription instead...as a prolegomenon to that unfinished task.Foucault was a French philosopher, historian of ideas, social theorist, philologist and literary critic.This volume was edited by Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton.
2,534 citations
"Technology of Self, Technology of P..." refers background in this paper
...It is in Foucault’s sense a ‘technology of self’ (Martin et al. 1988:18)....
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TL;DR: Using two waves of panel data from Americans' Changing Lives (House 1995), the relationships between volunteer work in the community and six aspects of personal well-being are examined: happiness, life satisfaction, self-esteem, sense of control over life, physical health, and depression.
Abstract: Using two waves of panel data from Americans' Changing Lives (House 1995) (N = 2,681), we examine the relationships between volunteer work in the community and six aspects of personal well-being: happiness, life satisfaction, self-esteem, sense of control over life, physical health, and depression. Prior research has more often examined the effects of voluntary memberships than of volunteer work, has used cross-sectional rather than longitudinal data, and, when longitudinal, has emphasized social causation over selection effects. Focusing only on the consequences of volunteer work overlooks the antecedents of human agency. People with greater personality resources and better physical and mental health should be more likely to seek (or to be sought for) community service. Hence, we examine both selection and social causation effects. Results show that volunteer work indeed enhances all six aspects of well-being and, conversely, people who have greater well-being invest more hours in volunteer service. Given this, further understanding of self- versus social-selection processes seems an important next step. Do positive, healthy people actively seek out volunteer opportunities, or do organizations actively recruit individuals of these types (or both)? Explaining how positive consequences flow from volunteer service may offer a useful counterpoint to stress theory, which has focused primarily on negative life experiences and their sequelae.
1,479 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors construct an integrated theory of formal and informal volunteer work based on the premises that volunteer work is productive work that requires human capital, collective behavior that requires social capital, and ethically guided work that require cultural capital.
Abstract: The authors construct an integrated theory of formal and informal volunteer work based on the premises that volunteer work is (1) productive work that requires human capital, (2) collective behavior that requires social capital, and (3) ethically guided work that requires cultural capital. Using education, income and functional health to measure human capital, number of children in the household and informal social interaction to measure social capital, and religiosity to measure cultural capital, they estimate a model in which formal volunteering and informal helping are reciprocally related but connected in different ways to different forms of capital. Using two-wave data from the Americans' Changing Lives panel study, they find that formal volunteering is positively related to human capital, number of children in the household, informal social interaction and religiosity. Informal helping, such as helping a neighbor, is primarily determined by gender, age and health. Estimation of reciprocal effects reveals that formal volunteering has a positive effect on helping, but helping does not affect formal volunteering
1,262 citations
01 Sep 1986
TL;DR: In this article, a critique critique of " l'Essai sur le Don " de M. Mauss, a lumiere of l'ideologie de l'echange maori et hindouiste
Abstract: Relecture critique de " l'Essai sur le Don " de M. Mauss, a la lumiere de l'ideologie de l'echange maori et hindouiste
597 citations
"Technology of Self, Technology of P..." refers background in this paper
...I suggest instead, studying volunteer work from a perspective inspired by Mauss’ notion of the ‘gift’, a perspective from which the dichotomous distinction between altruism and self-interest, ‘investment’ and return, dissolves (see Parry 1986)....
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TL;DR: A notable feature of the reform programme sponsored by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been the expansion of social organizations as discussed by the authors, which has created an increased organizational sphere and social space in which to operate and to represent social interests, and to convey those interests into the policy-making process.
Abstract: One notable feature of the reform programme sponsored by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been the expansion of social organizations. With greater social space created by the reforms and with the state unable or unwilling to carry the same wide range of services and functions as before, organizations with varying degrees of autonomy from the party-state structures have been set up. They have been allowed or have created an increased organizational sphere and social space in which to operate and to represent social interests, and to convey those interests into the policy-making process. They not only liaise between state and society but also fulfil vital welfare functions that would otherwise go unserved.
452 citations
"Technology of Self, Technology of P..." refers background in this paper
...Social organizations are welcomed for their potential to take on social security and welfare responsibilities from the state (Saich 2002)....
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