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Drawing on ethnographic and archival research, this paper investigates the response of a Chinese voluntary association in New Zealand to demographic changes in the national Chinese community since the 1990s. The Chinese Community Association developed from the closed-off and inward-facing Chinese community of New Zealand – the “old Chinese” whose ancestors arrived from rural Cantonese-speaking counties in Guangdong in the 1860s. Immigration law changes in 1989 brought new communities speaking different languages, with different political, social and economic backgrounds into New Zealand, creating new diversification to what it means to be a Chinese New Zealander. This paper investigates how this “old Chinese” association has adapted to “new” Chinese groups. We argue that a unique “rooted cosmopolitanism” has developed in this association, where local practices and resources have enabled it to manage potential tensions and growing pains of serving diverse groups in the current multi-ethnic context of New Zealand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we rethink the chronotope approach by examining what happened to religious space-times in a Chinese urban development project that completely transformed what had once been five relatively rural townships. What happens to chronotopes when a place is so completely transformed? We focus on multiple chronotopic dimensions in the religious experience of those villagers whose families had long occupied this land, but who now live separated from their old neighbors, without their old livelihoods, having lost their old temples, and surrounded by new migrants who are generally wealthier and better educated. Building on recent anthropological work on chronotopes, coupled with insights taken from Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Gilles Deleuze, this article explores the complex interrelationships and workings of chronotopes through the idea of the fold. This approach reconsiders what the boundaries between chronotopes might look like—not necessarily straight lines that are difficult to cross, but more like the infinite inflections of curves as those curves intersect and interact with each other. Rather than thinking of chronotopes as structured wholes separated by clear boundaries—much as we also tend to think about "states," "cultures," or "ontologies"—folding allows us to reconceptualize the kinds of interactions that take place when one space-time touches another. We examine in particular three ways in which folding elucidates how chronotopic boundaries can work: they can make the distant near, separate inside from outside, and complicate the boundary by interdigitating. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the angst of deeply committed volunteers in China, engaging with anthropological debates on ethics under conditions of "moral breakdown." Under market socialism, sacrificial volunteering is both ideologically glorified and socially deviant, placing volunteers at the point of dissonance between conflicting moral discourses. Interrogating the monolithic governmentality perspective that informs most anthropological studies of volunteering, we highlight the "fractured governmentality" that prevails in contemporary China, where contradictory modes of ethical subjectivization structurally generate moral breakdown. Volunteers are caught between the moral imperatives of altruistic sacrifice derived from China's socialist revolutionary tradition and "neoliberal" utilitarianism derived from market rationality. Unable to articulate their commitment in reference to either moral code, they are at a loss for words and produce an ethics of emotional authenticity that resists incorporation into any discursive ethical system. Instead of public engagement, volunteering becomes a private, misunderstood, and unspoken personal choice, an emotional act or a concealed "faith" that warrants no ethical justification. Undermining the dichotomy between the inertia of moral habitus and the reflexive ethics of creative agency that structures much of the anthropological theorization of moralities, the Chinese volunteers point to what we call an embodied "ethics of the heart." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]