Just thought I’d contribute a post as a way to test out the blog stream.
Last night I saw a news report on CBS news focusing on the rapid growth of the wedding photo industry. Couples are going all out, spending up to $10,000 on elaborate wedding photography that allows them to “re-enact romantic fantasies”.
One of the things that I found most interesting was the couples that chose to have wedding photos with themes connecting to Imperial China. I’ve skimmed through Jefferey N. Wasserstrom’s China In The 21st Century: What Everyone Needs To Know, and couldn’t help but think of the section dedicated to the resurgence in a historic national pride in the wake of the cultural revolution, which attempted to stamp out all memory of Imperial China. Evidently one of the more popular themes in these wedding photos are “Imperialist China” shoots.
At the same time I believe this extravagance in terms of things such as weddings in a country “where the net urban income averages less than $250 a month” really shows that the people of China are acutely conscious of their country’s status as a nation with one foot in and one foot out of an overall global acceptance and extremely eager to enter a larger cultural dialogue.
Check out the article here
And The Video……
Sam- Thanks for sharing this, and the connection you make with Wasserstrom’s book is spot on. As we move toward the Orientation and then into fieldwork, it will be crucial to pay attention to all the tensions/dynamics that contextualize “culture” via economics, global structures of value, and the various strains of national attention to heritage and identity. Great post to get us started!
I have been examining the comments section of this article and other articles I have been reading about China to prepare for this class. These comment sections at the end of articles offer insights into reader’s perspectives on China. One comment on this article, in which the poster presents themselves from a Western possibly American perspective, states “Lovely couples. But it’s really sad when weddings become an ‘industry’ here, in China or anywhere else.” I have found similar comments on other articles where the poster is critical of the growing consumer driven elements of China’s culture which mirror Western ones. I wonder to what extent these types of judgments exist in Western minds as there become growing similarities between Western consumer culture and consumer culture in China.
@rothstei Great observation, especially since public commenting structures such as this (relatively new features of the world-wide public sphere) house such wide-ranging ideologies! Think about what you are reading/hearing with these comments in relation to Wasserstrom’s analysis of the relationships between U.S. and China cultural frameworks….