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Based on fieldwork in an urbanized village of Shenzhen, this paper analyzes the place of schools in the reproduction of Chinese state capitalism. It retraces the circuit of socialized capital that allows for the social reproduction of the native elite and the exclusion of many migrant workers in the context of Shenzhen’s development as a special economic zone and its efforts to upgrade the economy. The native villagers, now forming an urban upper-class of rentiers, have capitalized on their overseas connections and capital accumulation to finance their school, allowing for their elite’s upward social mobility after, but also already under Mao. After China’s transition to capitalism, this school has served as an asset in generating value in the context of redevelopment and the real estate-driven upgrading of Shenzhen’s economy. Property ownership is now a major criterion in points-based systems for accessing school places. I make two interrelated arguments. First, there is a closer relationship between the secondary circuit of socialized capital and the larger circuit of capital than what the literature on social reproduction implies. Second, the conditionality of quality education upon value generation amounts to separating the population deemed worthy of socialized reproduction and the surplus population that is left out. The paper connects diverse strands of social reproduction theory, Althusser’s interpellation and ideological state apparatuses, feminist agentive social reproduction theories, and Bourdieu’s capital conversion recuperated within a Marxian framework, to provide an integrated approach to social reproduction within capitalism.

This chapter discusses what the case of Pine Mansion reveals in terms of the processes and periodization of Chinese globalization. It considers Chinese globalization as the major feature of the last wave of globalization that is neither new nor chaotic and occurs within an integrated world system. It also reviews Chinese emigration in light of a moral economy of scale based on the distinction between scale as scope and scale as valence. The chapter highlights the Chen lineage, which has been globalized by a century of emigration. Although they are still global in reach, the diasporic networks have refocused on the place of origin as a consequence of the creation of Shenzhen and the reopening of China.

This chapter is based on the visit of a group of Tahitian Chinese to their villages of origin, who experienced the journey as a return although none of them were first-generation emigrants. It considers the travel itself as a continuation of their quest for identity and a response to an absence of knowledge transmission within the family. Because many of the villages of origin have now vanished, searching for their roots is becoming increasingly difficult for diasporic visitors. The chapter examines the main elements that account for the Tahitian Chinese's approach that is largely based on searching for clues and signs, making the journey itself much like a detective game. One of the travelers' paradoxical uses of the Tahitian term mana, the magical power and energy emanating from the ancestors, reveals the tension at the heart of the diasporic relationship.

This chapter considers narratives and statements about geomancy (feng shui), the desirability of emigration and the possibility of return, and donations from overseas. Geomancy and donations from overseas are indicative of how Pine Mansioners question the distribution of value between themselves and those who have left. It highlights that the improvement in local livelihoods reduces the incentive to migrate and engenders sociodicies of (im)mobility. The chapter reviews moralized comparisons of people's trajectories according to whether they have stayed in the village or left. It analyzes the implicit moral condemnation of migration by those who have stayed, and the local, more than national, morality revealed by the way some illustrious returnees are considered exemplary figures. How the acts of migrating and returning, or not returning, are morally valued, vary notably according to historical period and social class.

This chapter examines the tension between the global scale on which kinship with distant overseas relatives is located and the difficulty of maintaining ties when there is no longer a close kin relationship. It explains that the global scale is the scale on which the state liaises with the descendants of emigrants who are no longer Chinese nationals, based on a rhetoric of blood ties. It also highlights that the global scale of lineage kinship is based on a rhetoric of global brotherhood that confers prestige on the local inhabitants of the former lineage villages. Using observational material on emigrants' descendants' visits to the village and their encounter with overseas liaison workers, the chapter assesses the ambivalence that characterizes the Qiaolian with regard to its attitude to visiting overseas Chinese. It shows how despite the lineage leaders' rhetoric of global brotherhood, interactions between locals and visitors from overseas are limited by the latter's absence of local close kin.

This chapter is based on the material in the lineage genealogy and recent surveys in the Hakka lineage–village that estimated the number of kin living abroad and in Hong Kong. It discusses how the comparison of these two sources reveals the extent to which ties with relatives who are not only geographically remote but also genealogically distant have relaxed. It also distinguishes between two main migration periods: the first is at the end of the nineteenth century and the two decades following the revolution of 1911, while the second follows the advent of the Communist regime in 1949. The chapter highlights the difference between these two periods in terms of the mobilization of kinship ties. It mentions a hypermobile class of entrepreneurs that differ from those of the older diaspora and are the focus of the current Chinese authorities' discourse on patriotic migrants.

This chapter talks about the global overseas extension that offers the lineage economic and symbolic resources based on its prestigious past, which the people of Pine Mansion have used to counter some of the changes induced by economic reforms and urbanization. The people of Pine Mansion were mobilized to defend two of the village's most important sites: the grave of the founding ancestor and the century-old primary school, and spatial rationalization. It analyzes these mobilizations in terms of scalar action rather than neoliberal governmentality. The chapter looks at the principle of the public good and the figure of the founding ancestor, which stands for the public good and are systematically invoked in calls for local and overseas financial contributions. Diasporic funding has been instrumental not only in the revitalization of ancestral worship in villages but also in the cunning circumvention of government-imposed urbanization policies.

This chapter develops a processual geography and history of the diasporic relationship. It tracks the changes over time in the amounts donated locally and from overseas to the village school and other public projects from the 1920s to the late 1990s, as well as smaller differences linked to each project's local or global scope. It also talks about financial flows that reveal changing relations of dependency and the shifting valences of local and global scales. The chapter shows how the relocation of the lineage foundation from Hong Kong to Pine Mansion in the early 1990s embodied the change in relations and signaled a reterritorialization and relocalization of the lineage and its ritual economy. The history of overseas donations discloses the strategic positioning of migrants and their descendants in the world system.

This chapter examines the diasporic relationship through the lens of ritual. It traces how the revival of ancestor worship from 1981 was actually its relocalization, since its practice was moved overseas during the period when it was prohibited on the mainland. The way in which the rituals are performed today is the outcome of negotiation between the villagers and Hong Kongers. The chapter looks at how the rituals accomplish the fusion of spatiotemporally distant kin and simultaneously display tensions and differentiation. The symbolic association of the diaspora with the past is very visible in the ways the villagers contrast their overseas.

This book explores the transformations of Pine Mansion—a Shenzhen former emigrant community—and its members' changing relationship with their diaspora around the world. For more than a century, inhabitants of Shenzhen's villages have migrated to Southeast Asia, the Pacific, North and South America, and Europe. With China's economic global ascendancy, these villages no longer consist of peasants dependent on their rich overseas relatives. As the villages have become part of the special economic zone of Shenzhen, the megacity that embodies China's rise, emigration has waned. Lineage ties have long been central in choosing migration destinations and channeling donations to village projects. After China's reopening, Shenzhen's villagers used diaspora as a resource to participate in the city's booming economy and to reestablish and protect their ritual sites against government plans. As overseas financial contributions diminish and diasporic relations change, the book highlights the way emigration is being reconceptualized in regards to China's changing position in the world, offering a new perspective on Chinese globalization and the politics of scale-making.

Public goods have been neglected, if not outright rejected, by the anti-capitalist literature, which favors “commons.” This article argues that equal attention should be given to commons and to public goods—both are essential to social reproduction. Their difference is not one of nature, but of status; it results from the way they are managed and distributed. I offer some conceptual clarifications in the literature on commons, public goods, club goods and private goods, and argue for an approach that looks at the status of goods. This opens up room for examining two ways struggles for social goods are and may be waged: commoning and publicizing. While commoning practices require organization at the community level, publicizing practices make claims on the state as a provider of public goods.

Over the past two decades, politicians and intellectuals have lent support to rising anti-immigrant sentiments, ethno-nationalist integralism and far-right populism by coining expressions such as ‘cultural exclusion’ and claiming to be speaking in the name of the ‘people’, often under cover of anti-political correctness. In this article I identify a series of recurrent features of such ethno-nationalist identitarian theories. The book I am critiquing, PC Worlds: Political Correctness and Rising Elites at the End of Hegemony (2019) by Jonathan Friedman, is a clear example of these trends. The scholar who had previously critiqued racialized politics and the reification of cultures now offers a book in favour of anti-immigrant ethno-nationalism and radical cultural othering. The article shows how this is the result of contradictions related to the evolution in his own thinking and situates these contradictions in regard to different theories of the nation-state. It also demonstrates how Friedman has proceeded to hollow out his own previous model, by making a distorted and normative use of it, and points out a number of weaknesses, particularly regarding the notions of ‘elites’ and ‘hegemony’. Finally, it questions the very project of conducting a study of political correctness.

The specific question this chapter addresses is how to account ethnographically for change that unfolds on spatial and temporal scales larger than those of the ethnographic field study without opposing the local site to global forces. My research engages a processual approach which examines the effects of China’s transformations and the creation of the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone on the relationship between the members of a former emigrant community and their diaspora. I propose an analytical distinction between two relational dimensions of scale in which social action can be considered: scale as the scope of social systems or chains of interdependence that extend in space and time and in which actions and interactions take place, and scale as valence, i.e., the desirability of scale defined relative to other scales, generating “scalar projects.” I focus on how contradictions in the collected field materials are telling signs of accelerated change that generate conflicts of scale, and use such “diagnostic contradictions” as a starting point for understanding how people attempt to make sense of rapid change and reconceptualize the valence of local and global scales.

This article examines the practices of ‘flexible kinship’ used by Chinese migrants in colonial Tahiti. ‘Flexible kinship’ draws attention to the strategic uses that are made of kinship in the context of migration and diaspora: the adjustments to cultural, political, and legal borders that lead to changes in family forms and in the relations between kin. Using a multi-generational perspective, I examine how families were shaped by successive changes and reversals in legal-political and economic events and conjunctures over the long twentieth century. I argue for the importance of addressing transnational border-crossing practices that involve not just a spatial extension of networks but also legal strategies within the host locality. I further show that if it is true that the Confucian hierarchical order has conditioned transnational practices of flexible kinship, then this hierarchy has not only bent to the circumstances, it has to a great extent been weakened. Finally, I argue that the history of familial adjustments has shaped a habitus that maximizes economic and legal security, especially among women.

Over the twentieth century, Chinese migrants and their descendants in colonial Tahiti (today French Polynesia) mobilized kin transnationally to accumulate capital. Families were shaped by successive changes and reversals in legal-political and economic events and conjunctures. Using a multigenerational perspective, this chapter examines their transnational practices of ‘flexible kinship’—strategies of flexible (re)location and gender-selective legal recognition of family members in response to fluctuations both in legal and political immigration regimes and in economic opportunities. Transnational practices are not necessarily translocal. In making this distinction, the concept of ‘flexible kinship’ moves beyond the preoccupation within transnational studies with movement or dispersal in space. The shift highlights the importance of addressing practices that involve not just a spatial extension of networks but also practices that cross legal boundaries within the host locality itself. These legal manoeuvres are temporal in that they seek to evade constraints and also to accumulate a variety of resources—different kinds of capital—through the exploitation of differentials in regimes of citizenship and mutating economic contexts. The practices of flexible kinship can be analyzed at the juncture and disjuncture of two temporalities: the migrants’ own, that is, their perspectives, life trajectories and family dynamics across generations; and the global temporality of capitalism and hegemonic relations in the world-system, which influences regimes of citizenship and policies towards migrants and their descendants. I show how the discrepancies between temporalities and the migrants’ resulting strategic adjustments delineate three periods in a history of distancing and rupture with the Chinese homeland. I further argue that successive changes and reversals in conjunctures have shaped a habitus that maximizes economic and legal security for families and individuals, especially women. Today, flexible kinship practices by descendants of Chinese migrants are less oriented to the country of origin than to other destinations. The concept of discrepant temporalities is therefore also a useful guide to the progressive shift and reorientation from a migratory to a diasporic transnationalism.

Dans cette communication, je mene une analyse ethnographique d’un voyage de « retour aux sources » effectue en Chine par un groupe de personnes dont un ou plusieurs ascendants etaient des chinois qui avaient migre vers la Polynesie francaise au cours des grandes vagues migratoires du tournant des XIXe et XXe siecles. J’examine leurs pratiques de recherche, qui sont l’objectif principal de ce type de voyage, en meme temps qu’elles sont constitutives d’une facon bien particuliere de voyager – un « tourisme diasporique ».A la difference des Marranes du Bresil, il ne s’agit pas d’une memoire prise entre fidelite et deni, longtemps sauvegardee dans le secret. Il est neanmoins question d’une memoire malmenee par une histoire heurtee. Mon point de depart est le parallelisme entre les moments cles du « retour » des Marranes, exprimes dans leurs recits par des mots tels que « eveil » ou « illumination », et le resurgissement activement recherche par les voyageurs polynesiens.J’avance que ces voyages dits de « retour aux sources », ou de « quete des racines » sont guides par le principe apparemment paradoxal d’une re-familiarisation avec l’inconnu. Montrant comment le voyage est lui-meme apprehende et mis en acte, suivant un paradigme indiciaire, comme un jeu de pistes, je restitue comment les voyageurs ont mene une quete experientielle d’itineraires passes, ceux de leurs ancetres. Ces quetes sont menees dans un etat d’ouverture a la decouverte, et suivant un principe de remise deliberee au hasard des rencontres avec des lieux et des personnes. Cette disposition a la fois corporelle et mentale, et ce cheminement hasardeux, peuvent etre analyses comme devant permettre la rencontre spirituelle attendue avec les ancetres. Tout se deroule comme si les voyageurs esperaient – et certains atteignent effectivement cette fin desiree – se plonger dans le passe au travers de l’experience vecue du voyage. S’opere alors une forme de resurgence qui revet, comme l’ecrit Nathan Wachtel, « l’evidence du toujours su »

Dealing first with the debates on the applicability of the notion of diaspora in the case of China, this article advocates its use as an analytical category. In the perspective of a global anthropology aimed at accounting for the variability of temporal and spatial scales, it questions the conditions according to which a population can be called « diasporic », and adopts a diachronic perspective so as to reflect on the conditions for maintaining « diasporicity ». Rather than advocating a priori paradigms of either « centered » or « de-centered » diasporas, the author offers to speak of « diasporic problematics ». These involve a tension between the maintained identification of its members to an original collective, within and in spite of dispersion, and their distancing from that collective, due to their localization in a host location. « Diasporic problematics » specific to China are then identified, based on the consultation of historical literature with a wide focus on Chinese migrations. These problematics can be further qualified by being applied to the field. Based on her long-term research in an emigration village in the Pearl River Delta, the author shows that in the case of South China, the lineage link with the original locality constitutes the empirically observable material, where the problematics are crucial. It also provides the main guiding thread of the ethnographic investigation.

Cet article se propose de revisiter l’ancestralite dans un ancien village situe dans la Zone economique speciale (ZES) de Shenzhen, en Chine ; creee presque ex-nihilo en 1980, celle-ci est devenue une megalopole de plus de huit millions d’habitants. Il s’agit de montrer comment l’ancestralite s’est metamorphosee dans le contexte de l’urbanisation. Depuis la creation de Shenzhen, le village quasi mono-lignager des Chen, fonde au 18eme siecle, a vu sa population fortement augmenter. Desormais fondu dans l’agglomeration urbaine, il n’existe plus administrativement comme village. Cet article montre comment les changements lies a l’urbanisation, et principalement la reforme fonciere, se sont accompagnes d’une modification du rapport aux ancetres, en se penchant plus particulierement sur le statut de l’ancetre fondateur du lignage-village et la place renforcee que celui-ci s’est vu conferer. Sa tombe, menacee de destruction par les plans d’urbanisation, a ete preservee par la construction d’un mausolee qui la surplombe et qui sert egalement de cimetiere public. Plus largement, la figure de l’ancetre fondateur sert de porte-drapeau a l’action et a l’identite collective des membres de l’ancienne communaute villageoise. On assiste ainsi, en depit de, mais aussi en raison meme de la disparition du village mono-lignager, a une reformulation de l’ancestralite dans le nouveau cadre urbain. L’ancestralite a mute a travers un nouveau partage de l’equilibre entre « prive » et « public ».

Cette etude presente une analyse de l'evolution institutionnelle dans les Etablissements francais de l'Oceanie (EFO, aujourd'hui la Polynesie francaise) durant la periode 1880-1945. La particularite des EFO tient a ce qu'une partie de la population a recu la citoyennete francaise a l'annexion, l'autre partie ayant le statut de « sujets ». L'attention sera portee ici aux droits politiques effectifs plutot qu'a ces categorisations statutaires qui s'averent peu determinantes. Ce sont plutot des categorisations racialistes qui sont sous-jacentes a l'attribution et la suppression des droits.

Since the early nineties, several hundreds of Chinese immigrants have settled in what has become known as the 'Chinese wholesalers area'. For the past two years, Chinese wholesalers in Aubervilliers have been calling on public authorities to address the problem of street robberies and violent thefts, which they experience on a daily basis. Yet, they have been encouraged by the authorities to ensure their own protection, by - amongst other things - installing surveillance cameras to film the streets. This is illegal according to French legislation on camera surveillance. Knowing this, why have surveillance cameras been adopted as a solution? This question guides the ethnographic analysis presented here of a situation where the installation of surveillance cameras was locally negotiated by the main actors involved - namely, the wholesalers' representatives and the police.

fig. 1 Guerriers mongols en terre cuite et statue de Gengis Khan sur le site touristique du Mont Khan a Holingol, Mongolie interieure, juillet 2012 © Ren Junchuan/Xinhua Press/Corbis. Les politiques museales et patrimoniales prennent la suite et epousent les logiques d’une longue histoire d’intervention etatique dans le domaine de la culture. Elles revetent neanmoins un aspect singulier dans le contexte des dernieres decennies : en Republique populaire de Chine (RPC), celui des reformes econ...

This article challenges the notion of economic rationality as a criterion for explaining ethnic boundary maintenance. It offers an ethnographic analysis of inter-ethnic relations in the context of games (cockfights and game-fishing contests) in the island of Raiatea (French Polynesia). Although all players engage in the same basic gambling practices, money is differentially scaled and mobilized by the Tahitian and Chinese participants. Building on recent pragmatic approaches to rationality, it is shown that the players' rationalities differ not from the point of view of economic maximization, but only in so far as they participate in social relations at different scales.

Dans le cadre de la politique multiculturelle de protection des minorites menee par le gouvernement taiwanais, le Comite ministeriel aux affaires hakkas (Keweihui) a planifie dix-huit « halls culturels hakkas » dans chaque comte et municipalite. L’article retrace le processus de creation d’un de ces halls dans le nord de l’ile de Taiwan au cours de la decennie 2000. L’amenagement du hall procede a l’incorporation d’artistes locaux dans une tradition nationale hakka reinventee. Il est montre comment sa genese s’est produite a l’intersection d’une politique impulsee par le haut et d’un projet emanant d’acteurs locaux. L’article met en evidence comment les categories yingti (hardware) et ruanti (software) president a sa fabrication, et impliquent une opposition et une complementarite entre « contenant » et « contenu », « Etat » et « societe », qui agissent a toutes les etapes de sa mise en œuvre.

This article examines the uses of the local/global dichotomy in anthropology. It is argued that the use of these terms as analytical tools tends to lead to a reification of "global forces" seen as external to the local site where the ethnographic study takes place. To avoid endless debates on whether or not the "global" can be the object of ethnographic scrutiny, anthropologists should treat the local and the global as scalar properties of social systems that are generated in the course of historical processes.

Cet article interroge les pratiques familiales transnationales dans la diaspora chinoise a partir d’une etude plurigenerationnelle de la communaute chinoise en Polynesie francaise. Il conceptualise la notion de « parente flexible » afin d’examiner comment la famille est mise au service de strategies d’accumulation de divers capitaux culturels, symboliques, economiques mais aussi juridiques. La parente flexible recouvre l’ensemble des pratiques consistant a jouer sur l’agencement et la composition de la famille en vue de s’ajuster aux, et de beneficier des differentiels entre regimes et conjonctures en situation transnationale.

In the interest of contributing to the study of the Chinese diaspora as well as identity formation in Pacific societies, this article examines the historical transformation of Chinese identification in a French colony that has been turned into a French Overseas Territory. Identification consists in individual positioning within a field that is shaped by the changing configuration of global relations. I explain how this leads to a differential structuring of Chinese identifications between a `local' and a `cosmopolitan' pole. Instead of assuming that the descendants of Chinese migrants constitute a homogeneous entity, it is their differing identifications that are brought to the fore. I examine the conditions of possibility that might account for the sense of belonging to a `Chinese diaspora', and its relation to the maintenance of the ethnic Chinese category in French Polynesia. I stress the importance of observing the role ethnic categorization plays in this longue durée persistence.

This article presents a historical overview of the Chinese community in French Polynesia, from its initial structuring into associations at the end of the 19th century until the restructuring that occurred at the end of the 20th century. The use of a combination of models brings into relief the correlation between class differentiation and the relative importance of sharing the same surname and ties of affinity. The analysis highlights the link between the community's internal structure and the mode of organization of Chinese associations in the guise of real estate holdings. Until recently, leadership was entrusted to a limited number of wealthy merchants and their families who were shareholders in these holdings. The termination of this system in the 1990s was linked to the change in the mode of membership to the associations and to the wider Chinese community. The shift from compulsory membership to voluntary membership is evident with the emergence of new types of associations aimed at preserving Chinese cultural identity in French Polynesia, but it is also true in the case of clan associations. The way in which modes of affiliation to the associations changed over time reveals a correlative change in the way Chinese identity is expressed today.

The first part of the dissertation is devoted to the formation of the Chinese community. It starts with the study of the successive waves of immigration, the creation of the community’s institutions, and it’s structure, shaped by relations between rival associations and economic and kinship ties between its members. Then the presentation of economic and social relations within the colonial society is followed by an analysis of the ways in which the Chinese inserted as a distinct ethnic group. The development of a plural society is further emphasized by examining how the colonial authorities implemented differentiating politics. The second part focuses on the Chinese family in French Polynesia. It is shown how its structure allowed a flexible adaptation to the economic and political context, and the perpetuation of Chinese lineages is studied through the kasan (ancestor worship). The question of the maintenance of distinct Polynesian and Chinese lineages despite the integration of Polynesian women leads to examining both the changing place of women within Chinese families, and the situation of children born from mixed unions. The uncovering of how a “uterine logic” contradicts the “agnatic logic” allows approaching the problem of metisses identities. The third part centers on individual identifications. It includes a study of the contemporary restructuring of the community, controversies on remembrance of the coolie past and question of the former consulate) and of the change in mode of membership to the community’s associations. The emergence of a “symbolic ethnicity” interacts with the multiethnic politics promoted by the authorities of the Territory, in regard, particularly, of relations to China. Eventually, the factors underlying differing identifications, in the form of cosmopolitanization or localization, among persons with Chinese origins, are outlined. This leads, in conclusion, to the organization of a framework for understanding identifications: the field of identifications rests on the combination of the axis of the “en-soi-pour-soi” and the axis of the “pour-autrui”.

© musee du quai Branly, photo Anna Gianotti LabanJean-Paul ColleynAnthropologue, directeur d’etudes a l’EHESSAnne-Christine Tremon n’a pas pu venir en raison d’un empechement universitaire de derniere minute. Mais elle a nous a envoye une videoconference. On connait bien Anne-Christine a l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes ou elle a fait sa these sur le monde chinois.Nous avons deja beaucoup parle d’histoire hier et aujourd’hui ce sera encore le cas, puisque certains intervenants elargissent la focale jusqu’ a considerer des processus de mondialisations anciens. Nous serons donc amenes a considerer le theme de variations d’echelles, mais aussi le theme de l’ecriture puisqu’on sait que l’ecriture de l’histoire a concerne d’autres disciplines, y compris l’anthropologie et pratiquement toutes les sciences sociales.Je profite egalement de cette introduction pour dire que j’ai eu l’occasion de travailler un peu avec Emmanuel Terray, car je lui avais demande de faire un livre d’entretiens qui a ete publie par les editions Labor. C’etait un exercice qui m’a vraiment passionne parce que, d’une part, j’apprenais enormement de choses, a la fois sur l’etat des recherches et des rapports entre la philosophie et l’anthropologie en France, au moment ou Emmanuel est arrive dans le champ de l’anthropologie venant de la philosophie, sur les rapports de force intellectuels qui existaient a cette epoque, puis aussi sur les premiers pas de l’ethnographe. Pour moi c’etait tres emouvant parce que je reviva [...]

La pêche au gros, big-game fishing, pratique élitiste comparable à un safari maritime, a été introduite en Polynésie française par un écrivain voyageur américain lors d’une escale sur l’île de Tahiti. Bien qu’elle ait été réservée dans un premier temps à l’élite occidentalisée, cette pratique s’est popularisée en se diffusant. Elle est pratiquée dans le cadre de championnats annuels dont le nombre a connu une forte inflation au cours des cinq dernières années. L’article montre comment son implantation locale s’est accompagnée d’une tendance à la ludisation, processus inverse à celui de la sportisation généralement associé à la globalisation des pratiques sportives. Il est montré comment l’adoption et l’adaptation d’une pratique importée passe par la mise en adéquation aux normes locales régissant les rapports sociaux. En outre, en tant qu’ils constituent aussi des jeux d’argent, les concours de pêche sont à mille lieux de l’image d’une enclave démonétarisée préservée du « tout fric » associé au sport mondialisé. Il est montré que les concours sont des dispositifs sociaux de circulation de l’argent et de la chance et forment des sphères différenciées d’appartenance sociale et culturelle. Big-game fishing, an elitist practice comparable to a marine safari, was introduced into French Polynesia by a travelling American writer during a stopover on the island of Tahiti. Although initially reserved for the Westernised elite, this practice has become more and more popular as it has spread. It is practised in the context of annual championships whose number has grown significantly over the past five years, notably that of the Leeward Islands (Raiatea, Huahine, Bora Bora). The case of the Polynesian adoption of big-game fishing throws light on the social, economic and cultural mechanisms at work in the processes associated with the globalisation of sport. The article show how its local presence has been accompanied by a tendency towards « gamification », the opposite process to the « sportification » generally associated with the globalisation of sporting practices. The adoption and adaptation of an imported practice are shown to take place by means of a bringing into line with the local norms governing social relationships. In addition, in so much as they also constitute a form of gambling, fishing competitions are far removed from the image of a demonetarised enclave preserved from the « tout fric » (literally « all cash ») associated with globalised sport. The competitions are shown to be social apparatuses for the circulation of money and luck and to form differentiated spheres of social and cultural belonging.

This article examines the process of neoliberalization in the Shenzhen special economic zone in Guangdong Province, China. Building on the case study of a former peasant and almost single-lineage village that has become a part of the city of Shenzhen, I show how neoliberal principles aimed at advancing the transition to capitalism are combined with and countered by other ethical traditions. Owing to the long-standing conception of the lineage as an enterprise, the maintenance of the lineage structure in the transformation of the rural collectives has offered fertile ground for the emergence of a local capitalist coalition. Yet the current discourses on the necessity of obliterating the remains of the collective economy and introducing individual ownership run counter to the collectivist values of the lineage village community and the embeddedness of its economy in kinship and territorial ties. I further illustrate this discordance by the way in which the villagers managed to save their founding ancestor's grave site following government requests to clear the land by removing tombs. These policies form a complex blend of state interventions in the economy, neoliberal governance, and Confucian principles.