Paper short abstract:

Friends and kin in rural China frequently and fervently engage in intense emotional disputes with those they consider "close". Through these exchanges people enact care and concern, but also stake productive and destructive claims over one another's lives by emphasizing mutual entanglement.

Paper long abstract:

Friends and kin in rural China frequently and fervently engage in intense emotional disputes with those they consider "close". These exchanges carry both productive and destructive potential for interpersonal relationships. Through these heated interactions people express care and concern for each other, but also stake claims over one another's lives through emphasizing mutual entanglement. Two examples illustrate this process: First, a mother who provided her daughter with unmitigated advice and unsolicited opinions about her life choices, leading to initial estrangement and later rapprochement. Second, a group of friends who shunned etiquette and engaged in increasingly explicit "impolite" encounters to reveal "honest" perspectives. By performing "closeness" through these boisterous, heated, and intense exchanges, friends and family make appeals to relationships based on unmediated directness. However, the concluding analysis shows that they simultaneously stake mutual claims over each other, revealing both constraint and obligation within an unfolding canon of entangled ethics.