Original citation:Steinmüller, Hans (2011) The moving boundaries of social heat: gambling in rural China.

In this article, I deal with the tension in rural China between vernacular practice in local sociality and official representations related to processes of state formation and with the ways in which this tension is revealed and concealed through gestures of embarrassment, irony, and cynicism. Such gestures point toward a space of intimate self-knowledge that I call a "community of complicity," a concept derived from Michael Herzfeld's outline of "cultural intimacy." I illustrate how such communities are constituted with examples involving Chinese geomancy (fengshui), funerary rituals, and corruption. I contrast this approach with arguments made about "state involution" in China. [rural China, state formation, state involution, cultural intimacy, fengshui, corruption] People do not fight for abstract perfection but for the intimacies that lie behind it.-Michael Herzfeld T he inauguration of a newly built house is a rather important event in rural China. In the past, it was celebrated as shang liang: the raising of the ridge pole. Where I did fieldwork in 2006-07 in Zhongba village in the Enshi region of Hubei province, 1 a lot of construction activity and, hence, a lot of these celebrations were taking place. The roofs of new houses are no longer built of lumber but of bricks and concrete, so the celebration is no longer called "raising the ridge pole" but "pouring the concrete" (E. dao ban'r 2 ). But, just as in former times, relatives, neighbors, and friends are invited for the event, where they are supposed to eat a meal and give small gifts of cash to the homeowner.The celebration for the pouring of the concrete roof of Pan Dejun's new house was set for early August 2006. Over time, I had become a regular visitor at the Pan household, which was just a five-minute walk from the village administration building where I was living. Pan Dong, the family's 14-yearold son, had informed me well before the event that I should come to the new house on day so and so for the inauguration. At the celebration, I rarely saw his father, Pan Dejun, and when I did see him, he looked rather grim and nervous. His arm was bandaged: He had broken it when he fell from the scaffolding at the construction site. After dinner, the guests went to the side rooms of the house to play mahjong, and I was dragged along as well to sit down and play. We played until late in the night; only then did I realize that the concrete for the roof would not be poured until midnight. Pan Dejun had hired a contractor to do it, and he arrived with a team of ten workers at 11 p.m. They prepared their machines and started to carry the concrete in buckets on shoulder poles up onto the formwork for the second floor. I found it incomprehensible that they would start this work under the light of their headlamps at midnight, the most inconvenient time one could think of. When I asked Pan Dejun to explain, he told me that the workers

In everyday life, people in China as elsewhere have to confront large-scale incongruities between different representations of history and state. They do so frequently by way of indirection, that is, by taking ironic, cynical or embarrassed positions. Those who understand such indirect expressions based on a shared experiential horizon form what I call a 'community of complicity'. In examples drawn from everyday politics of memory, the representation of local development programmes and a dystopic novel, I distinguish cynicism and 'true' irony as two different ways to form such communities. This distinction proposes a renewed attempt at understanding social inclusion and exclusion. I also suggest that irony, so defined, might be more conducive to an anthropology that is ethnographic and dialogical.

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Capturing people, sometimes by taking relatives hostage, is a common practice for purposes of conscription and law enforcement in the Wa State of Myanmar. Given the unreliability of the local census, as well as the relative weakness of civil government, and registration in a de facto state governed by an insurgent army, the personal politics of capture provides a functional equivalent to state legibility. This personal politics operates based on the reorganization of personal networks between representatives of the military state and ordinary people: first, circles of acquaintances within the military state that provide access to local knowledge, and second, relationships of patronage formed on the basis of those new acquaintanceships, as well as connections of kinship and co-residence. Conscription by capture, however, also requires anonymity; that is, the passive non-recognition of mutuality with strangers and the active refusal of mutuality with acquaintances. This article describes the historical emergence of networks of acquaintances and relationships of patronage as a combination of Maoist state-building and local institutions of war capture and adoption. It demonstrates how conscription by capture relies on relationships of acquaintances and non-recognition, as well as on patronage and the refusal of mutuality. The politics of conscription by capture are contrasted with conscription in imperial states and contemporary nation-states.