Symbolic Appropriation of the Internet: Modernity, Peasant Bodies, and the Image of Familial Intimacy in China’s Nongjiale Tourism Online Advertisements

Abstract

The peasantry is probably the last social category that researchers of technology and society readily associate with the use of high technologies such as the Internet. But in China recently, tens of thousands of peasant entrepreneurs, engaged in a unique form of rural tourism popularly called nongjiale (delights in farm guesthouses), have adopted the Internet as a medium for advertising their farm guesthouses. This paper is an anthropological study of how Chinese peasant entrepreneurs’ adoption of the Internet is engrained in the broader material and symbolic orders of contemporary Chinese society. By exploring the way in which the Chinese peasants are idiosyncratically involved with the Internet, it also questions whether STS (Science, Technology, and Society) concepts such as users and non-users, developed essentially within Euro-American contexts, are adequate to explain the symbolic appropriations of high-tech in pursuit of modernity in China today.