Quanmin Li, Department of Anthropology, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University
From gift to commodity: Tea in the Ang society in Southwest China
This paper mainly focuses on tea and adopts the Maussian view of gift and commodity exchange to discuss the structure of social relations of the Ang people, drawing on the author’s ethnographic research in an Ang village of southwest China. Through illustrating how the Ang use tea in their gift giving to show their identity relationship with gift receivers and how the Ang sell tea to the market to build up their interaction with buyers, the paper argues that gift relations and commodity relations are two important parts of social relations of the Ang people. They are not isolated but co-exist in the Ang society.
