In Rural Origins, City Lives Roberta Zavoretti shares stories of the migrants she came to know whilst living in Nanjing for one year in 2007. Her principal interlocutors include a family of self-employed fruit-sellers, bakers in a factory and two young female employees in a tailors’ shop, all of whom have a rural household registration status (hukou) and a long-standing presence in the city. Through careful attention to their appearance, biographies, daily practices, interactions, social relations and use of space, Zavoretti paints a compelling, sensitive and nuanced picture of who China's migrant workers are. In the process, she contests many of the assumptions about migrant workers that prevail in Chinese official and media discourses and in the international academic literature on the topic.
Zavoretti's intellectual premises, explained in the Introduction, are at least two-fold. Firstly, while mainstream accounts of China's migrants implicitly accept that the state-endorsed free market drives much human behaviour, ethnography highlights the contradictory moralities, logics and aspirations inculcated in individuals across time and space which inform their everyday practices. Secondly, the category of “migrant” requires disaggregation because the labour migration paradigm typically frames inequality in terms of rurality, residency and geographic mobility, thereby eliding questions of class, the privatization of public welfare and obstacles to social mobility. When individual migrants’ different social positions are recognized, one necessarily looks beyond state categories to see their different visions of and possibilities for social mobility. In this respect, individuals’ ideological articulations of their own mobility strategies provide a basis for elucidating the complexity and diversity in migrants’ visions of success, their social relations and their everyday practices.
Chapter one rehearses a now well-charted terrain in the Chinese studies anthropological literature about peasant worker bodies of no value versus urban middle-class bodies of value (suzhi). Zavoretti discusses how in Nanjing, middle-class bodies were the standard against which peasant workers were measured, and how different migrant individuals dealt differently with this representation of human worth. Chiefly, some interlocutors labelled other migrants as being of lower worth. Some accepted the peasant worker label placed upon them – but often in ways that accorded special value to hard work, for instance, expressed as pride in dress that prioritizes practicality over fashion. Meanwhile, some migrant workers admired or else questioned the supposed superiority of middle-class Nanjingers.
Chapter two likewise engages with a theme popular in both Chinese studies and the anthropology of migration in examining how migrant workers articulated their own identities, and how their subjectivities were formed in the course of their everyday interactions with their family members, friends, colleagues and co-villagers. Zavoretti shows that unlike the stereotypes of migrants, the people she met were motivated not by the pursuit of an urban identity per se. Instead they talked about working hard to fulfil their obligations to their families. Indeed, hard work constituted a core moral value that the migrants used to distinguish themselves from the dull and spoilt Nanjingers who had some public welfare support at their disposal.
Chapters three to five provide the most original and interesting insights in the book. In chapter three, Zavoretti explains that urban residents often do not recognize the migrants as peasant workers, or see that they make their lives in Nanjing on a long-term basis. Instead, like many academics and policy-makers, middle-class Nanjingers assume that migrants live only on the outskirts of cities or else in segregated spaces in the cities and that their stays in the cities are transient. By contrast, Zavoretti shows that the social exclusion of people of rural origins occurs through regular encounters in public spaces whereby Nanjingers treat migrants as inferior because of their menial work, employment insecurity, demeanour, poverty or lack of education. Zavoretti also richly observes how her migrant friends used interstitial urban spaces such as pavements, basements, alley ways, malls and parks to flexibly create shelter, home and leisure for themselves in response to the circumstances underpinning their social exclusion.
Chapter four challenges middle-class representations of rural-born people's consumption practices as either extravagant or “irrationally limited” (p. 110). Instead, Zavoretti demonstrates that in an environment characterized by increasingly complex social segmentation, her interlocutors frequented markets which attracted customers of mixed social backgrounds and of similarly constrained purchasing power. Zavoretti argues that her interlocutors’ consumption aspirations were primarily oriented towards acquiring the goods and services which in the socialist era the state had provided to urban workers, with housing at the top of this list. Zavoretti contends that in an environment where so much has become commoditized, her interlocutors’ consumption practices resembled those of urban-hukou Nanjingers who had failed to be “successful” consumers.
Chapter five explores ideas about success. Zavoretti demonstrates that while migrant workers were exposed to media images about desirable lifestyles, her interlocutors did not hold static ideas about personal success and many aspects of their ideas about a good life were not unique to people of rural origins. She shows through vivid personal stories that her interlocutors’ views of personal success centred on marrying, maintaining close family relationships, supporting the family economically, having a son, and giving children a good life. She further shows that gendered beliefs, identities and practices were important to her interlocutors’ ideas of success, with men and women framing their changing everyday practices in terms of their gendered familial roles and obligations.
Overall, the reader learns much about the lives of several different types of worker from rural origins while simultaneously gaining fresh inspiration for thinking conceptually about labour migration, urbanization, social inequality, success and family. Social mobility as an ideology “elaborate[d] and reinvent[ed] in different ways through social practice” and always in the context of intimate relationships (p. 165) is a deceptively simple lens through which to examine migrant workers’ lives, but it works extremely well. The book's theoretical arguments are robust throughout but rendered lightly such that the lively empirical material appears to speak for itself and the prose flows easily. Zavoretti's ethnography is an enjoyable and rewarding read and the book will appeal to a wide audience.
