ABSTRACT
If, as Yingjie Guo argues in this volume, the existing body of work on social inequality in China has not paid sufficient attention to the critical role of state power in its generation, the same thing can be said about the role of culture. In other words, an explicit articulation of culture as a category for analysis is still largely missing from the existing scholarship on inequality in China, as are the conceptual and methodological implications of treating culture in this way in approaching inequality. But what is culture, and what has culture got to do with social inequality? And what is the point of analysing the cultural causes and consequences of social inequality? This chapter advocates a ‘cultural turn’ in inequality studies, and suggests that the investigation of the cultural politics of inequality offers a new and potentially innovative pathway to understanding social inequality in China. This cultural turn consists of, on the one hand, the culture of inequality, and on the other hand, the inequality of culture. The culture of inequality can be defined as a set of moral, social and political-economic values and assumptions that govern the ways in which inequality is rationalized, maintained, managed and negotiated in institutional and organizational settings. The culture of inequality also refers to the structure of feelings that emerge differentially from the daily experience of individuals on each side of the inequality. A cultural turn also enables us to better understand the inequality of culture, which refers to unequal access to an array of symbolic resources–the right to self-presentation, to have a political voice, to have one’s stories and interpretation of social life heard and recognized as legitimate, as well as to the capacity to embody socially and politically appropriate sentiments and desires. The argument regarding culture and inequality rests on this premise: if social scientists have no trouble agreeing that inequality is arguably the overriding and most profound social problem in contemporary China, then current and future scholarship must be directed to analysis and critiques that offer an intellectual basis for strategic interventions in moral and political terms. And an account of the relationship between culture and inequality constitutes an integraldimension of this intellectual project. This chapter demonstrates that the relationship between culture and social inequality is symbiotic and complex. There are three arguments, to be pursued in three sections. The first section, drawing on ethnographic insights, advances an argument for approaching inequality as cultural politics. The second section, on the culture of inequality, traces the process by which certain social groups’ political and economic values and moral sentiments are translated into common sense across the social spectrum in post-Mao cultural politics. The third section, on the inequality of culture, demonstrates that the construction and maintenance of this common sense is achieved through, and in turn relies on, structurally inequitable distribution of what Charles Tilly calls ‘valueproducing resource of limited availability’ (Tilly 2003: 34), including both material and cultural resources. These three arguments advocate a fresh perspective that enables the symbiotic relationship between the cultural and the political-economic perspectives to emerge.
