It's widely recognized that researches of cultural anthropology play an important role of cultural critique. As an ethnography of mundane life in a Chinese rural village, the book Hvgiene, Sociality, and Culture in Contemporary Rural China: The Uncony New Village, by Lili Lai, does remedy our limited understanding of hygiene and other aspects of contemporary village life in China. In this work, hygiene is pulled out of its usual realm of science and medicine, returned to the daily life of villagers, and then rethought of. The author argues that knowledge and practices of hygiene are local and contextual, rather than universal.
To accomplish her doctoral dissertation, the author spent almost one year during 2005-2006 doing ethnographic fieldwork in a rural village in Henan Province in central China. Since then, the author has revisited the village several times and kept in contact with key informants in the village via telephone so as to continually update her understanding of it. Notably, this is not an isolated "traditional" village, but one involved in the macro-urbanization process in China. Many new-style two-or-three-story houses have been built in the past decade. A lot of young villagers migrate to work in cities far away from the village.
